61–70 of 351 posts
Mastodon still only has favourites. There's no way to say "I like this toot, but not enough to retwe... boost it" on Mastodon. Favouriting is more like "this is the best ever and I want to return to this later" -style bookmarking in my mind.
I might consider building something vaguely similar with a different featureset meant to fill a vaguely similar niche. A few half-formed thoughts about possible features for such a system:
- There is a hard limit on the number of users a given account may reply to, loosely inspired by Dunbar's Number. Let's say 50. This forces people to prioritize carefully who they want to interact with.
- Adding or removing someone to your reply list takes a day to take effect. This might reduce the degree to which flame wars can spread - by the time people have unlocked the ability to reply to something controversial, they'll have had a little time to cool down / have people generally lose interest.
- Limiting the number of tweets, retweets, and replies an account can make per day. I don't have any concrete numbers here, but the goal is to make people think more about what they actually want to reply to.
I'm not confident anything Twitter-like is actually a salvageable concept. These are some things I think might improve the odds of building something similar that isn't a toxic dumpster fire by nature.
No one here is answering your question so I will :) Database: I’d use whatever you know and helps you get to market, but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap out later. Lots of good choices here; I’d pick mysql or postgres running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1 because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care would have to be taken to ensure it doesn’t…
Build a protocol specification instead, and we can have multiple competing implementations (like Email). This is what Jack Dorsey was suggesting.
Doesn't this already exist in the form of ActivityPub? Whether you're using Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, etc., you can interact with instances that use that protocol. There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.
Honestly this project looks pretty interesting, and I hope it takes off. Want more decentralized tech without horrendous "defi" attached.
Build a protocol specification instead, and we can have multiple competing implementations (like Email). This is what Jack Dorsey was suggesting.
Based on cryptographic signatures. If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33419574 by dustedcodes. Signed: mejutoco", then nobody could take this converstion away from you. It would be federated by all competing services that use this protocal.
RSS People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference. If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort. Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).
RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional.
The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets.
As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few users like to spread the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/).
But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore, RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage.
Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself.
RSS is an undeniable convenience for readers but its limited scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for writers publishers.
RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is out of scope for RSS.
So whatever can replace Twitter will look like something closer to Twitter than RSS.
EDIT reply to: >That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies,
I was talking about the RSS-user-themselves wanting the capability to _write_ the replies and not reading others' replies. RSS is not a read+WRITE protocol. It's a pull-based reading protocol.
IMO, that's an absurd proposal completely detached from reality. I wholeheartedly care about what I write/post on any site. It's a trip down the memory lane. Even on Hacker News when I see what I posted in my earliest days, I feel proud of how much I have grow since then. I would be pretty pissed if I can't trust the fact that what I post won't be preserved.
Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. I have tried to build one, I failed even though our tech was superb. If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around. Which existing social networks (not media on…
> Everyone, please stop thinking about HOW you want to build a twitter alternative. No one cares. The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments a lot of people here evidently do care.
RSS People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds. No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference. If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort. Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).