Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to humans there are brands yearning for recognition
Also pets, objects, ideas and parodies.
Can we say that any of those are "using" Twitter though?
I'm on the fence whether brands do.
Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
211–220 of 361 posts
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#212I 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/…
>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.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#213The 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…
Twitter's approach of contextless messages of limited length has made Twitter particularly suitable for shouting into the void. There's little context, unlike in a longer Facebook-style post, and every reaction stands on its own. It's only really suitable for announcements, not for meaningful discussion. Threads make it somewhat possible to tell a longer story, but it's still less cohesive than it would be anywhere else.
It's short and context free, which means it's only for soundbites, which is why it's popular with politicians and trolls.
Nobody uses it to coordinate anything, they just use it to announce stuff or just to shout. That's all it's good for.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#214The 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…
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?
To answer your question, since the other replies are being disingenuous, it's a dog whistle for groups including 'liberals', left wingers, and - historically - Jewish people. This is why the OP comment makes the unsubstantiated claim that it's a method of coordinating an in-group's thought - as though agreeing with a left-wing bias Twitter is because of brainwashing and propaganda.
It's unsubstantiated because it's easily proven wrong. Twitter was home to Trump's presidential campaign. It's home to groups like ISIS, the Western output of the Kremlin, of the CCP, of Bolsonaro. Of Musk.
There is a point to be made about the changing role of Twitter. In my mind it is for some definition of 'elites' - but for expressing their views to their followers, not for coordinating. Sad that this opportunity to discuss such has been co-opted by conspiratorial rhetoric.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#215I 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…
Hey, do you have any good intro to ActivityPub? Any aggregator or feed like RSS has? Looks very interesting.
No I'm afraid I've looked very little at the actual protocol, mostly been busy running a node.
I have seen a few people write their own AP implementations, in their personal blogs for example. It doesn't seem hard. My suggestion to learn AP would be to integrate your own blog into AP first. That way you learn by doing.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a completely pointless and banal digression into divisive politics when nobody asked for it.
But what the fuck is an "Elite" anyway?
Rich/powerful people. But they don't use Twitter to coordinate anything; way too public. They just use it to speak to the masses.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Account data migrations are already supported on ActivityPub. If they didn't like the way they are implemented, they could have extended the specs. Building a completely new protocol just because you want to support account migrations your own way is just dumb.
My understanding is that ActivityPub, while being federated, puts huge amounts of power and responsibility in the hands of the node operators, including access to private messages. Identity is at the core of most systems, so if the architecture doesn't work (which would make sense given that ActivityPub is older), then a different protocol may be better.
That's partly true, but ActivityPub could be easily extended to accommodate that requirement.
As of now, the architecture is kind of flat - you have instances (about 10k for Mastodon), managed by admins, and admins all have the same rights and access control.
Bluesky wanted to go for a more semi-centralized "consortium of businesses" that separates the "small world" vs "big world" layer, or something a bit more hierarchical, and have strong authentication implemented on top of it. And that's fair enough - they could have easily implemented a system of keys and certificates hierarchically linked to the top node (the root node of the consortium). The underlying ActivityPub protocol would have remained the same, and they could have implemented whatever extension on top of it that supported source certificate checks, signatures, keys etc.
Twitter instances, or any other more "centralized" social network, could have shown posts with a green tick or whatever to tell that they are coming from a trusted source. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Diaspora and all the likes could have kept doing what they are doing now, their content wouldn't get the green tick if it comes from a server with its own certbot certificate that is not signed with a key generated through a certificate that can be linked back to the root certificate, but apart from that nothing would have prevented bidirectional integration between e.g. Twitter and Mastodon.
It was technically very feasible. And Jack Dorsey, as well as many from Twitter, was also sitting for a while at the same table that designed the ActivityPub specifications.
At some point they decided to leave that table because they wanted more of a say in the development of the protocol - they basically wanted to be more in charge, and shift the ownership of the underlying protocol from an open committee to a consortium of private companies.
Moreover, Dorsey also invested a lot of his money in crypto scams, and now he's that kind of guy with a toolbox full of hammers in search for something that looks like a nail. It's not a coincidence that a lot of the stuff that revolves around Bluesky looks a lot like a Blockchain.
I think these are the real reasons behind the development of an entirely new protocol. On a technical level, nothing would have prevented them from proposing some small patches to ActivityPub that wouldn't even have had to break back-compatibility. Everybody would have benefited from it - they wouldn't have spent a lot of engineering and R&D resources to reinvent the wheel, we wouldn't have had an N+1 protocol to integrate and write bridges for, and we would have finally had something like a truly native TwitterFediverse bidirectional integration that would have benefited users on both sides. But they have different goals than the rest of the people working on these open protocols, and that's why our ways parted.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#218Earlier 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?
What a completely pointless and banal digression into divisive politics when nobody asked for it.
If it didn't have a second meaning you wouldn't see this as divisive.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks! I think it will take time for my head to wrap around this concept though.
Re: Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?
#220Here's an idea: stop trying to fix social media and instead try to connect with people in real life and we as a society might be happy again