Ask HN: What social media site could replace Twitter?

My experience may have been specific and circumstantial, but somehow, Google Plus for a while was some perfect utopian Star Trek ideal of what Social Network should be like.

* Circles that were super easy to use and organize. All other social networks work hard to deter you from organizing and customizing your feed

* Enormous amount of good content and easy curation and sharing. People would make Circles of e.g. "Really Good Photographers" or "Interesting Physicists", and then share those circles. So in the morning I could go "Hey I'd like to read a bit about interesting physics" and click my Physicists circle, and in the afternoon I could say "I want to see some pretty photos" and see various photographers.

* It was good for customizing both content consumption as per above, but also content creation & sharing - I have a funny IT joke, I'll share it to my "Coworkers" and "Coding nerds" circles. I've done a really great wedding shoot this weekend, I'll share it to my "Photonerds" circle. etc.

It was genuinely amazing and awesome and perfect, for me.

Everything since has been actively moving away.

Ah, but /. had meta moderation. Seriously that L2 moderation isn't done anywhere else.

The good thing about a protocol (which ActivityPub is) is that it's not so much a matter of one person's bad software crashing my good software somehow, as it is a question of either forming your packets correctly, and getting good discourse in your federated software, or forming your packets badly, and having your software be algorithmically treated as "deprecated" or spit back an error response or whatever. Protocols act as a bit of a filter that way, it seems to me - each operator can surge forward in terms of bleeding-edge features, or stubbornly refuse to upgrade their versions, but there will eventually be a Wordpress-like herd instinct that will result in a settled "current" version (or version range) that works well enough.

Whatever version of the protocol becomes widely used among the small existing userbase of whatever protocol wins the popularity lottery will gain support from that community, which will create the usual feedback loop of improvements and greater stability as more resources are brought to bear on making it work, and by the time the punters show up it'll be pretty well-baked, and some early adopters might get burned. I insisted on Betamax back in '83, and I had to live with Betamax till about 87. First world adolescent problems.

It's never been more evident that the social platforms as they exist today are an overall social sickness, in ways that every previous Threat To The Children that I've lived with (drugs, video games, heavy metal music, etc) turned out not to be. So, we have to move to something different or else just plummet into barbarism, which even with the current situation I am betting against. People want hot water when they turn the tap and they'll settle the hell down and beg to help bring it back if they get a real taste of missing meals en masse. Dog help any elites hoarding resources on that day.

On a practical and constructive note, someone else mentioned smaller, more locally-based platforms, and that is the only thing that seems workable to me as a way forward. I used to run BBSes in the 80s and early 90s, and was guilty of Digital Utopianism in extremis through to the naughts. The source of that utopianism was how good the old BBSes were at giving a loser like me a social community and real friends, and also how that experience was largely replicated, in a morphed kind of way, on Usenet and later in some, but not all, web-based forums. MySpace was my first real inkling that things were going very wrong.

I live in the Manitoba Interlake, and I've been pondering what a local, BBS-like web site, perhaps using ActivityPub in some way and focused on my area would look like, in terms of operation, preventing abuse, etc. The BBSes were kind of an underground society of sorts, but a largely benign one focused strictly on fun, and the fact that we were all in the same city and would likely have to face each other at some gathering enforced some basic politeness rules that vanished with the perceived anonymity of this place.

Back when I was a Sysop, I used to require an actual phone call before giving users leech access (ie. to the file section with the all the goodies). Not because I thought of it, it was just how we did things, kinda like that guy who did the Ted Talk where he was holding the printout with the names and addresses of "everyone on the internet" sometime in the mid-80s. We all had fake handles, absolutely all of us, but we all knew each other's real names, back then. I think anything less than that anti-anonymity will degenerate into some degree of whatever we end up calling this social jock itch we're all living through, so I'm probably gonna try putting something like that up for my local community. There's a new ISP deploying fibre right this moment, and I might talk to them about handling the hosting, and limiting traffic only to their network or traffic verified to be originating from this geographical area.

The solution to all this is gonna be small and widespread, not big and centralized, whatever the case.

There was a Southpark episode about this. Well, not Twitter, but Walmart. Same or very similar problem. Everyone in town was convinced to stand up to the big-man and riot against Walmart in favor of the little stores that had more integrity. Walmart was destroyed, people rejoiced and everyone went to the smaller local store. This caused the local store to get big and experience the same problems that Walmart had and displaced other small businesses. Then they rioted and burnt down the formerly small store. Rinse and repeat.

So Mastodon then? It is federated, but does that solve the problem? Or do a handful of clusters get really popular and then all the people that made Twitter toxic move in and corrupt the Mastodon nodes? Does Mastodon then create mechanisms similar to "verified" accounts, shadow banning, de-ranking algorithms, etc...? Do bots infiltrate Mastodon? Does the DHS Ministry of Truth coerce the popular Mastodon instances into having a government portal for monitoring and silencing posts? Are we entirely certain that governments did not pay developers to create Mastodon? I ask because that is exactly how Google project Birds of a Feather, Stanford SRI and Facebook project LifeLog, DARPA/CIA started. I honestly don't know the answer, just a gut feeling.

Is this just a technology problem or also a societal problem? Could it be that when the internet was small, there were little pockets of people forums, chat groups, etc that had mostly like minded people and they mostly sortof got along and were not popular enough to draw in coercion from corporations and governmental entities? Did Twitter connect all those pockets of people, corporations and governments leading to the inevitable drive to win the psychological control over the masses? Is there money, power or control to be obtained in winning the hearts and minds of the people?

>The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts.

So like TV, circa 1980. Funny how a lot of us are kinda pining for something like that to come back. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, by the way, but I am very amused, in a gallows kinda way, cause it seems to me that we have smashed that bottle real good. Someone wished for an M80 and blew the bottle up with it while the genie laughed.

That whole idea of "important" people is looking pretty ragged right now. I can't think of anyone I trust to (a) know what's actually going on in any sort of expansive, globalized way, and (b) report that truth to me honestly, or even in a way that earnestly considers my real best interests. I have intellectual figures I trust to interpret the facts that come before them in a way I agree with and consider sound, some of whom do have public profile enough to disseminate those interpretations, but what facts are they interpreting, and are they actually facts?