HN Explorer

Ask HN: Where Are the Twitter Clones?

3 points by smrtinsert ↗ HN
Back in the day clones would shoot up as soon as someone got into trouble, usually even leveraging a pre-existing open source code base.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anything like that yet following the current Twitter fiasco. Mastodon is a vastly different prospect - where are the Twitter clones that people expect at a time like this?

3 comments

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awb
If by “back in the day” you mean 10-15 years ago, then Internet and social media adoption was a small fraction of what it is today.

Today, you can’t handle (or attract) a large percentage of Twitter users without tons of financing (to handle server costs until ad revenues kick up) and lots of paid or viral advertising.

The 1st 80% of the functionality is super easy and open source, it’s the last 20% of handling advertising, content moderation, content algorithms, etc. that’s more complex.

smoldesu
Why would you use a Twitter clone? If you object to the idea of someone buying a platform you like, you probably shouldn't move to a platform with the same problems.
jurassic
There are no good Twitter clones because, despite all the memes about "I could build that in a weekend", reproducing Twitter would be a very significant undertaking. And even if you managed to make a good knock-off, there's no clear path to profit.