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Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

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Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#121

Post by prox »

tokenadult wrote: post #103
mirzap wrote: post #22

How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternativ…

The phrasing "Twitter alternative" is my fault in setting the title for the thread-opening post here. The "Twitter alternative" phrasing should not be attributed to the founder of Post. I get the impression that the founder, Noam Bardin, DOESN'T think he's building a Twitter alternative but rather, in the beta welcome page's words, "a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators,…

I like the goals and intent behind it, that alone is worth it. Most comments here don’t even debate Noams welcome words. A platform that isn’t a wild west race to the bottom of ad revenues? Sign me up! Micro payments for valued content? Heck yeah!

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#122

Post by Kye »

NoGravitas wrote: post #89
crsv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.

In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.

Your numbers are a bit off. It's 7m total up from ~5.6m before all this, not active. The active count historically drops back down to ~100k after booms, but this one does seem different and sustained due to the different circumstances. It's usually a small burp in a specific community. It's never been all of Twitter's most active users from across all communities considering alternatives.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#123

Post by owlbynight »

NoGravitas wrote: post #89
crsv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.

In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.

It's one thing to get users. It's another to keep them. Mastodon's user experience is godawful. It might be an IRC replacement for nerds, but it'll never be Twitter.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#124

Post by babypuncher »

boplicity wrote: post #45
jasode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences . Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN webs…

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing. Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a susta…

That is exponentially more difficult.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#125

Post by moron4hire »

jasode wrote: post #36
ceres wrote: post #18

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point…

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences . Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN webs…

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

One of those things is not like the others.

This HN website, phpBB forums, etc., don't interface with other systems. Mastodon does. Usenet and BBS' problem was more that they just predated the massive influx of always-online users that came with the advent of smartphones.

It's not like Twitter is a single server through which all content gets pushed. It's a replicated, distributed network of servers. ActivityPub servers are too, except the shards in network are not all owned by the same entity.

How would you learn about something via Twitter, sans promoted tweets? You'd find out about it from the retweets of the people you follow. That's literally the same thing you'd do in a Mastodon instance.

The big difference is that nobody in the ActivityPub network has the power to force content into your feed. Hasn't that been one of the biggest complaints of mid-2000s era social media? That the algorithm takes presidence over your own preferences? Never in my life do I want to see another "here's one weird trick you can do with a couple of pennies in the bottom of a plastic bag" click-bait article. That's basically impossible to propagate within the ActivityPub network. But that doesn't mean nothing can propogate through the network.

I'm having long, engaging conversations about topics I care about with people within the ActivityPub network. Almost none of those people are on the Mastodon instance I am currently inhabiting. I'm having more of these conversation than I had on Twitter, where I have 15x the number followers. From my perspective, my word is getting out further through ActivityPub than it ever did on Twitter.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#126

Post by mradek »

macspoofing wrote: post #37
altacc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...

Who likes Twitter culture?

People who deem themselves to be important.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#127

Post by ryandrake »

0x445442 wrote: post #19

I find it hilarious that the Silicon Valley Apparatik thinks that NOW an alternate is needed. Gab, GTTR, Parler, Frank Speech, Truth Social have all existed for some time. And with the exception of Gab, the others have almost identical TOS agreements to Twitter.

Those networks were all marketed to Twitter cast-offs, specifically those people who were cast-off for the content they were producing. When your site is "The Alternative to Platform X" and consists of only users who got kicked off of X for bad behavior, the content is just going to be radioactive.

The only hope an alternative to Platform X has lies in its ability to migrate and capture the mainstream.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#128

Post by tokenadult »

OP here. My apologies for the phrase "Twitter alternative" in the article title, which is NOT exactly Noam Bardin's vision for the Post startup.

I appreciate the comments here from HN users. I've hardly posted here in a long time, because in recent years I have posted mostly about politics, which is off-topic posting here on HN. A federated world of specialized online communities is an appealing idea, and I will be trying out the Fediverse as well. (A lifelong friend who is an infosec specialist has landed on a server about infosec, and that's probably where I will establish a lurker account, in the interest of being on a securely configured server.)

Information security in an online service is one of the features I look for, and why I prefer big, well invested commercial online services to home-brew solutions. I figure HN has enough back-end infrastructure to keep what data I share with HN safe, and Facebook does too. (One can dislike how Facebook allows advertisers to look at user data while still appreciating how Facebook keeps away certain kinds of criminal threat vectors.)

The user perception of the user experience ultimately decides what users think about online networks. Part of the user experience in any network is the other users. That's what I've long appreciated about HN. That's what I liked about Twitter as I took care to follow interesting people who post there. I'll see about the newest communities and who else is there, and decide based on my preferences as everyone else will.

Thanks again for the back-and-forth in the discussion here, which has been good food for thought.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#129

Post by [deleted] »

Jorengarenar wrote: post #80
jghn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters…

One acronym: RSS I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.

[deleted]

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#130

Post by algurithm »

More options are a good thing, but his Twitter alternative might be misidentifying Twitter's actual strongest point. Allow me to elaborate and tell me if you disagree, but this is how I feel: I never used twitter because of the social aspects. At all. I'm not there because I want to have a chat. I just use Twitter to get new artwork from artists I like or follow game devs who post their content there. For me, Twitter's real value was always content sharing. The social aspect was tolerable at best and detrimental at worst, which is why I don't want to use an alternative explicitly focusing on the social aspect. What I really want is a Twitter with content creation focus, instead of social. I think most alternatives are focusing on the social aspects, so I thought I should share this sentiment.
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