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Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

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Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#251

Post by mcv »

samwillis wrote: post #99

Picks any two of these three, I don't believe it's possible to do all three: 1. Decentralised 2. No Spam/manipulation 3. No censorship (The boundary between what is classed as manipulation, and what shouldn't be censored will never be solved)

I think most decentralised social media networks already have these three. There is no censorship exactly because they are decentralised: you can always go to a different server. I don't see any spam there. There are some trolls, and they get blocked. When an entire server is full of trolls, some admins block the entire server.

No censorship doesn't mean everybody has to be forced to read your crap. People should still be able to block assholes. If you think that that's censorship, then it's your "no spam" and "no censorship" requirements that bite each other, and decentralisation has nothing to do with it.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#252

Post by zimpenfish »

verisimi wrote: post #154
zahrc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead, it seems everyone wants to live in a comfortable echo chamber, parroting the apparent consensus opinions Isn’t exactly this happening on the other side of the fence as well?

Absolutely. But I don't see them banning anyone from speaking. The idea is that people are able to say whatever they like. Their unpopular opinion may enlighten you to some salient information that you were unaware of. Banning, imprisonment, fines, etc, should be reserved for actions. Speaking your mind should be free. Even on privately owned platforms.

> But I don't see them banning anyone from speaking.

[1] disagrees. [2] disagrees. [3] disagrees. etc.etc.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-o...

[2] https://jezebel.com/republicans-are-trying-to-ban-speech-abo...

[3] https://truthout.org/articles/gops-banning-of-books-and-atta...

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#253

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #153
geuis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millions have been using the Fediverse for years Any evidence for this? Seems like this is something a few hundred or thousand even know about. That's a far cry from hundreds of thousands of millions.

https://the-federation.info/mastodon > Last 6 months users: 2254133 > hundreds of thousands of millions. hmm. 100 (hundreds) 000 (thousands) 000 000 (millions) 100 000 000 000. Earth human population: ~7 billion. 7 000 000 000. I didn't realize Twitter was expanding into the nonhuman market. Or are there more humans outside of Earth that no one told me about? Far cry indeed.

The f and r keys are very close to each others.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#255

Post by criddell »

blacklight wrote: post #150
geuis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Millions have been using the Fediverse for years Any evidence for this? Seems like this is something a few hundred or thousand even know about. That's a far cry from hundreds of thousands of millions.

There are 6M estimated accounts, and 1.5M active users: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/

So it’s basically as popular as MySpace is these days.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#256

Post by mcv »

INTPenis wrote: post #212
mcv wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the direction I'm thinking in. I'd like to see email integration, but with sender authentication and builtin encryption whenever possible, yet backwards compatible with email systems that don't support that yet. I want blog comments integrated so you can interact with the blog comments on your social media platform and vice versa. Maybe this can be done through a combination of RSS and a common comments/…

>So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve. This is the giant elephant in the room. If we compare AP to e-mail, then all of us who have worked in e-mail ops know the trouble brewing. And it has already started. So yes having a federated social media brings new problems but it also brings new freedoms.

I think having sender authentication would help a lot. Email infamously doesn't have that, which makes it easy to spam. If every spammer had to identify themselves, they'd probably be a lot easier to block.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#257

Post by zimpenfish »

tomcam wrote: post #103
somenameforme wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You care about what you have to say, and this phenomena at scale is why Twitter succeeds. The "important people" came after Twitter succeeded. And I'd argue that "their thoughts" amount to little more than a mixture self promotion, virtue signaling, and an occasional hot take. Twitter is likely more valuable to them than they are to Twitter, which is probably the driving factor behind the recent change. Validation ch…

> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. Has Twitter said so on the record? AFAIK the only reportage comes from unnamed sources in an article from The Verge.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 says "We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?" in a reply to Stephen King saying he'll leave if it's $20/month.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#258

Post by mcv »

mariusor wrote: post #227
jstx1 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon/Friendica/Diaspora look way too weird to normal people. Their branding doesn't have mass appeal (it's like they coordinated to deliberately pick bad names) and most people don't care about decentralisation at all. People want a cool app that has other people on it (their friends, other people they know about and celebrities).

I'm surprised that people don't remember how silly twitter, twitting, twit were considered by serious people when the service launched back at the end of the naughties.

Yeah, not exactly a good name, and yet it works. There's no reason these other networks can't work. But again, it's all federated and all open source. You can make a better name and start your own site that's more attractive to the larger public and still connect them to people on Diaspora, Friendica and Mastodon.

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#259

Post by smcl »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #192
blitzar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wtf is an "elite" anyway? The richest people in the world ... but not the ones that agree with me? The politicians ... but not the ones on my side? The athletes ... except for my team?

In the context talked about in the OP, an elite are a group of people that have a larger/an ousized amount of power in a specific social context. So yes, business leaders, high-ranking politicians and very wealthy people are generally part of the elite in our society. Note that a 'social context' can be society at large, but also much smaller, the board of a HOA can form an elite in a small town for example. That soc…

This is a good response, there's no reason for it to be downvoted

Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

#260

Post by mcv »

sneak wrote: post #222
tiarafawn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content moderation (which seems to be the biggest point of contention with Twitter right now) is decentralized. By choosing your hoster, you delegate content moderation capabilities for your feed to them. If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. I am not sure to which degree this is practiced/convenient in Mastodon currently, but its distribut…

> If you don't agree with their policies, you can switch to a different hoster without having to leave the ecosystem. But you lose all of your followers, so in practice this is never done. You’re stuck with the censorship imposed by your chosen instance operator. Most are more strict and less transparent than Twitter.

I know Hubzilla supports migrating profiles. I'm not sure if any of the others do. I know Diaspora doesn't, but I keep seeing comments in this discussion that suggest Mastodon does.
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