Ask HN: How would you design an alternative Twitter

To quote Nilay Patel [1]:

> I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems.

Things you mention like the backend data store truly do not matter. LIke at all. If Facebook can run billions of users on MySQL it just doesn't matter.

You then get into product questions, which (IMHO) are more interesting. Twitter grew originally as mobile-only. As in, the 140 character limit came from the (then) SMS limit and you signed up with a phone number. That's interesting history but would you do it the same today? No. Smartphones are ubiquitous.

It might be useful to reduce spam to tie an account to a phone number but that's a separate question.

What people on HN tend to focus on however is:

1. The API; and

2. Whether it should be federated or not.

For a truly open API, Twitter 2.0 just becomes plumbing, and not very interesting plumbing at that. Are you building a company or something like the Wikimedia Foundation? If it's a company, you lose the ability to easily advertise (ie monetize) your users with third-party clients so an open API is only ever going to exist until you get enough traction to throw all the third-parties off. We've seen this time and time again. It's Lucy and the football. It boggles my mind people keep falling for it.

You could monetize with a subscription model but users don't want to pay for things. We've seen this time and time again too.

As for federation, HNers seem to like this. They want Email 2.0. But email is terrible because of federation. Federation allows bad actors. more importantly, it doesn't solve any problem actual users care about. So it's going to be centralized.

Which leaves us to the biggest problem of all: the network effect. How do you get users on a social platform when everyone is on the existing platform? The answer is you really don't unless you invent a new product (rather than copying an existing one).

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

Whatever platform does not allow a search like "What did user U publish on day D" has a specific label:

it is substantially the Soviet Pravda.

Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to give an appearance of monolithic consistency. In general, if you have a collector and checking history is not a basic feature, than it is nothing but a joke.

(PS: the first post on HN is the 'Y combinator' submission from pg, Paul Graham, on October 9, 2006 - you find this with one URL. This is how it is supposed to be - the distantmost past is as accessible as the recentmost addition.)

App.net went braindead in 2014 and finally died in 2017. 2014 was a long time ago in internet terms. Just look at Mastodon: people are always declaring it dead, but the project's official instances alone are bigger than App.net at peak and it's funded on Patreon subscriptions. Mastodon's part of the fediverse ranges from 750k to 1m active monthly users using this model before adding in comparable and compatible stuff like Pleroma and Misskey. There's been a shift in people's willingness to pay for services that doesn't start or stop with social media.

Edit to add: App.net also had the problem of needing to justify $3m in funding. It "failed" because its model couldn't do that quick enough to make investors happy. A normal platform with slow but steady growth that depends on subscriptions doesn't have that problem as long as the bills are paid and enough people are happy with it to maintain growth. Mastodon proves it can be done, still running and growing a half decade after the entire SV media declared it dead because they didn't understand how self-funded platforms work. Others can learn from and build on it.

> When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard

Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?