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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out. How much time will the average twitter user invest into this…

@jeremyjh I genuinely appreciate your comments! Allow me to kindly respond... > ...best way to follow my interests... If you're still stuck on the topic of following interests, may i direct your attention to the following website: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi... And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of th…

Thanks for the kind reply and pointers to information. But if the Fediverse is not trying to take off, how can you you describe it as “mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.”? This new thing has ambitions at Twitter scale and beyond.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@jeremyjh I genuinely appreciate your comments! Allow me to kindly respond... > ...best way to follow my interests... If you're still stuck on the topic of following interests, may i direct your attention to the following website: https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basi... And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of th…

Thanks for the kind reply and pointers to information. But if the Fediverse is not trying to take off, how can you you describe it as “mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.”? This new thing has ambitions at Twitter scale and beyond.

The Fediverse en masse - and most participants that i have met on the Fedi in my 13 or so years on this thing - are not trying to "take off". However, the beauty of the freedom of the underlying protocols and other mechanisms like the software employed (with mastodon being only one example), offer the ability to scale up *if so desired*...But, again, my experience tells me that the vast majority like it as-is. For Mr. Bardin, while he might wish to scale his effort up to Twitter-like scale, i merely wished that he used some of the open source software already used and developed on the Fedi....with the benefit of more and continued universal interaction. There is already precedent, such that the mastodon.social instance is maybe one of the biggest if not the biggest instance on the Fedi (Of course, i know its not twitter scale, but its still pretty huge relatively speaking)....but the size of a big instance doesn't stop other instances from happlily staying small, but while still allowing for interaction among all. That's all i'm saying.

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

#223
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...

Last time I checked Gab was 10m+ users. Gettr gets 7m visits per month according to similarweb. "Very few people" is a bit of an understatement...

All of these stats are somewhat meaningless without common definitions. Number of users is not the same as active users.

If we compare similarweb’s estimates visits it’s 10.6 million for Gab and 7 billion for Twitter. Maybe it’s just my personal definition but these site were set up as direct competitors to Twitter and getting 0.1% of your main competitor’s traffic is definitely “very few people”.

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

#224
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?

Over 200 million active monthly users.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that if you wait until people start leaving it's too late. The bet here (and IMO it's a fair one) is that Twitter will continue to degrade as a service and eventually people will start leaving. If your alternative is up and running by then you've got a chance of capturing users.

Who says people aren't already leaving?

Twitter platform stats: https://botsentinel.com/stats/platform-stats

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

#226
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…

Reddit comes to mind as an alternative (to Digg) that succeeded (by at least some definitions of the word). A massive amount of Reddit's early user growth came from a poorly-received redesign to Digg's home page. There are a lot of parallels to draw to the changes Musk has in mind for Twitter.

Reddit also existed at the time and was a fairly mature product. It wasn't Reddit coming in after Digg, it was Reddit and Digg slugging it out in the market and Reddit coming out on top when Digg cratered.

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

#227
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.? Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the…

I use(d) Twitter as more of a meta-aggregator. It had actual social interactions combined with the sort of pointers out to news sites, tech blogs, etc. Perhaps I'm an outlier in how I use(d) it but I haven't come across anything that provided the same degree of convergence. This is precisely because it's mixing in short snippets from friends, acquaintances, and other people I find interesting. > Instead, limit conten…

That's fair. Personally, I like to keep things separated from one another for obvious reasons (controversial topics mixed with friends/family can lead to issues) but I can also see that others might prefer a single source.

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

#228
post #155
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.

The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user. Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.

> have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.

Excluding or severely limiting virality is the essential criterion for any Twitter replacement.

That said, though I like and use Mastodon (as I do Linux), it is just not going to get Twitter-scale mass adoption. It is not, and believing to the contrary is just obvious delusion.

Maybe post.news will. It's worth a try. But if it doesn't attenuate virality, it won't improve on Twitter enough to be worth the trouble.

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