Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 361 posts

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

#201

Post by viraptor »

mradek wrote: post #11

I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a so…

> I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset.

That seems like a business idea. A mastodon instance without public registration, requiring manual verification, making crossposts to other platforms built-in and trivial. Once established, charging the rich for verification/access, while inviting the known and worthy for free to keep the standards up.

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

#202

Post by jstx1 »

mcv wrote: post #171

Isn't Mastodon pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter? And it has the advantage of being distributed and it supports Fediverse cross-platform sharing (with Friendica, GnuSocial, etc). I'm on Friendica so I can follow people on both Mastodon and Diaspora (which would be the drop-in replacement for Facebook). Still, I think we need something better. I'd like to see a social network with all of that, and support…

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).

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

#203

Post by wruza »

remarkEon wrote: post #138

The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…

coordinate what they think

What does that mean?

(Edit: wording)

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

#204

Post by mcv »

INTPenis wrote: post #164

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of fe…

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/messaging standard.

I also want it to replace WhatsApp and Signal with a simple messaging service that can still run standalone, but can also be accessed from other platforms.

So interoperability with everything, but somehow also ensure security, block spam and abusive people, etc. Probably not an easy thing to solve.

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

#205

Post by arlort »

wruza wrote: post #196
INTPenis wrote: post #164

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of fe…

What do you mean by “boards inter-communicate”, how for example?

Not the person you're replying to but, using existing websites as an example, if I am not mistaken activity pub would allow you to see "twitter" posts from "facebook" and viceversa, or even using your "twitter" account to like and comment "youtube" videos

https://fediverse.party/

https://activitypub.rocks/

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

#207

Post by tiarafawn »

jules wrote: post #190
mcv wrote: post #171

Isn't Mastodon pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter? And it has the advantage of being distributed and it supports Fediverse cross-platform sharing (with Friendica, GnuSocial, etc). I'm on Friendica so I can follow people on both Mastodon and Diaspora (which would be the drop-in replacement for Facebook). Still, I think we need something better. I'd like to see a social network with all of that, and support…

What's the advantage of being distributed?

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 distributed nature enables this as an elegant solution to the content moderation problem IMO

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

#208

Post by INTPenis »

wruza wrote: post #196
INTPenis wrote: post #164

I have a problem with this fundamental thinking of what "site" should replace it. This is exactly why I'm an ActivityPub geek, because it's not one site, it's sites. It's many softwares and many sites. Now I'm not claiming it will replace twitter, or that it's easy to use for most people. I can say for a fact that it is not, I see twitter users come over confused all the time. But regardless I think the concept of fe…

What do you mean by “boards inter-communicate”, how for example?

Well for starters there are already over a dozen different softwares in the fediverse. I can't even say exactly how many there are because some people have made their own blogs connected to the fediverse.

So that's the true power of ActivityPub, that it can be integrated into any software. Wordpress has a plugin, Nextcloud is working on one, Gitea is working on some type of federation.

Since I only ever used Mastodon (and GnuSocial before that) I can only speculate how exactly they work but let's assume you post a blog post on Wordpress, that blog post is then posted using ActivityPub to other nodes where your followers are. It might be posted to an AP relay that just relays the posts it gets to all other nodes connected to it. Increasing the discoverability of your blog to people who don't follow you.

So that means all AP nodes connected to that one relay just received your wordpress blog post in their inbox and will show that to their local users. (you have to differ between local and remote users in the fediverse).

And then the remote users of other nodes can comment on your wordpress post, and those comments are in a thread so you as the owner of the wordpress post will get those replies back to your instance, which is your wordpress blog.

So what I just described is you posting a blog post from your wordpress, but receiving comments on your blog post from other softwares, other nodes, readable in the comfort of your own wordpress blog.

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

#209

Post by lazyeye »

remarkEon wrote: post #138

The vast majority of commenters here fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is, or rather what it has become. It's not a "social network" anymore. I mean, it is in the technical sense - you and I can both sign up for an account. But what it is today is an elite coordination mechanism, and Twitter became this because it was the first of it's kind and some sort of momentum or technological inertia put us where we're…

Agreed. Nothing has accelerated media groupthink more than Twitter.

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

#210

Post by soco »

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…

But then why the worry of the OP? Do they belong to the elite and face an awful future of lack of coordination?
Post reply on HN