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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

#91

Post by registeredcorn »

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…

>The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences.

But reaching a larger audience is inherently negative, not positive. What is the purpose for speaking to 10,000 users vs 10-20 users? If for marketing, or some other money making scheme, sure there is an advantage. But for users who care about specific content, what value does a cacophony of noise offer? As it is, unity and cohesion will always master diversity and confusion, so shouldn't a "larger audience" be the antithesis of what adds value to a platform?

To a degree, such things can even be seen in major platforms themselves. If we go to something like YouTube, there are different categories of content, and within each categories, sub-genres of content sorted by various factors users are truly interested in. It then does not make sense to attempt to reach the audience invested in makeup tutorials, to also foster users and content around HFT on NASDAQ. If anything, one group would accidentally stumble over the other, and be the worse off for it. This in turn, would hurt both communities atmospheres, and degrade the "convenience factor" of the platform itself. (The more categories and unrelated categories, the harder it is for the user to navigate the platform to find "worthwhile" content, and the harder it is for the owners to curate the UGC.)

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

#92

Post by BitPirate »

pjc50 wrote: post #47
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 current burst of activity is very much a "scramble for lifeboats" as people attempt to preserve a fraction of their social graph on Mastodon. But there won't be a big drop off in Twitter activity or relevance until Twitter goes full fail whale. Or there's a serious effort to kill the community somehow. (posting "joinmastodon.com" on twitter now gets you the "not allowed to post that link error. I guess this is wh…

If you post the correct link which is joinmastodon.org there's no problem.

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

#93

Post by nelsonenzo »

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.

How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.

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

#94

Post by dale_glass »

bedhead wrote: post #26

[flagged]

Oh fine, I'll articulate why. Musk doesn't know what he has bought.

He seems to think it's a technology company. It's not. It's an advertising business mixed up with a social platform. Those don't require lots of brains, in fact Twitter is already built and works. The what the likes of Twitter require to be successful is the willingness to carefully navigate a bunch of minefields and come up with compromises that make nobody happy, but keep trouble at a minimum.

Musk is obviously incapable of doing this. He just started, and immediately spooked the advertisers. Then he started whining, and threatening both advertisers and his own employees, apparently not realizing that he has no real power over either.

It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence. At this rate I expect him to be hit with fat fines from the EU, demands from various other countries to comply with their rules, piss off advertisers, run into trouble with illegal content of various kinds, and have stability issues and security exploits.

It's not that it offends me so much to have a conservative driven platform. It's that the man is clearly incompetent and flailing, and as amusing as that is to watch, it's clear the platform won't survive it so alternatives are needed.

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

#95

Post by noasaservice »

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…

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go!

That would be the fediverse (Mastodon).

Find a server with people who share your interests, or make your own. Making some VC shithead richer all the while you're gamified with rage and adverts is not what I want to continue doing.

Thankfully, with the Muskpolaypse, that's looking more and more sustainable. We're even now seeing news agencies casually adding their mastodon user.

> To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you.

And in Mastodon, data portability is a thing on every server. I can pack up all my data from one to the next.

And, any server that tries to be an advert spreading server will soon get defederated. Spam is not acceptable, at all.

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

#97

Post by anonporridge »

KVFinn wrote: post #83
thal3s wrote: post #6

We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social

Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown. Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed. Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.

Apparently this is the key difference they're working on for Bluesky. Trying to make accounts truly portable between federated servers.

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

#98

Post by avereveard »

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…

> How people don't get it

well, for one, because you're wrong. I mean, it's not like a hard topic to research, a walk in any supermarket should be plenty evidence, even before reaching the cereals section.

if you want something more aking technological, you can stop by the mobile phone shelf.

and if you insist with software, the choice is so ample whole sites exists just to help people navigate https://alternativeto.net/software/3ds-max/?license=commerci...

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

#99

Post by TheRealPomax »

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…

Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to users on a centralised platform is that their potential reach is that entire platform's user base. The exact same is true for any other platform, but the numbers differ by orders of magnitude, and as we all know: bigger number must be better.

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

#100

Post by standardUser »

thal3s wrote: post #6

We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social

Users don't want convoluted nonsense like Mastodon. They want a one-click sign up and ease of use.
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