Ask HN: What's Going to Replace Twitter?
When Musk first bought Twitter, I basically joined every single alternative that popped up. Mastodon, Hive, Post, Cohost, etc... if they exist, I've probably got an account on them now.
And I kinda expected people to move over after that. People were all making a big deal out of it, and there was a lot of interest in leaving the site after whatever questionable decision was made that week (Twitter Blue, the timeline kerfuffle, controversial accounts being unbanned, mentions of Mastodon and co being banned, etc).
Yet for whatever reason, no one seems to have stuck to that. Most of these places have communities, but the vast majority of people are either still on Twitter or keep posting there as their primary social media service.
So what will it take to actually replace it outright? To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg or Facebook killed Myspace?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
For example, if you go to coracle.social right now and go to the page to add relays, I see names like "wss://btc.klendazu.com" or "wss://nostr.ethtozero.fr". It seems (perhaps through no fault of the protocol developers) that it's becoming associated with cryptocurrency and it makes me not want to use it.
edit: I added a few relays that didn't seem to have cryptocurrency-associated names, and the messages I've gotten so far all look like bots reporting status about cryptocurrency mining, or transfer of tokens, or some other nonsense.
A lot of Nostr clients have Lightning Network built into them. That's what I meant by built in payment systems. That alone will ensure its possible success in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world besides the US.
> I kinda expected people to move
Why did you have this expectation? If you are big on Twitter why move and lose your audience? To "punish" Musk? That's absurd echo chamber, wishful thinking. If you are just a regular Twitter addict with no following why leave? To be alone and feel superior on weak clone?
There's nothing wrong with Twitter run by Musk. It's just as shitty as it always was. The UI was always shit, the 37/N threads were always full of trash and should probably just be a blog anyway. But people want the comment section dopamine rush of twitter.
People won't ever "move over". You can either use the protocol you like with the people that interest you, or use the platform that people are on. I say this harshly because I like Mastodon and I'm tired of people assuming that things will ever 'go back to normal'. Your idea of 'normal' is giving one party universal power over everyone, and if we make that same mistake again then we deserve another Elon Musk situation.
For messagebus style social media? TikTok.
Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand. You are either looking for an echo chamber that is tightly censored like twitter used to be (congrats on keeping your ignorance and refusing to listen to the other side all while virtue signaling how open and tolerant you are, when really you are just blowing smoke up your own ass), or you are going to end up a platform that has hardly any censorship at all and allows all the shit you are so mad about that is now back on Twitter.
>To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg
Reddit didn't kill Digg, Digg shot themselves in the head.
The decentralized/federated architecture makes it simple for admins of instances to ban whichever other instances they see fit. In practice, this means that it's effectively easier to ban unsavory users of certain undesirable types, since they tend to congregate on the same instances.
On top of that, there are traditional ban controls at both the user and admin level.
I've been a Mastodon user since 2017 and I've found it pretty good with respect to moderation and unwanted content. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the instances I've chosen, though.
It's even more hilarious that the false predictions like this one [0] and exaggerations of Twitter completely collapsing didn't happen.
> Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand.
Well, only the techies here are still pretending that Mastodon is a viable replacement to Twitter when Mastodon is the one losing users [1] because of the same fundamental issues, including less moderation - A inefficient and worse version of Discord.
Just wait until some instances get bought out by companies because of the number of users a 'moderator' has under their belt to sell the instance over. [2] So much for 'Social networking that's not for sale.".
The 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still didn't care to move to something even worse.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...
[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...
And then what? You can still use Mastodon, you don't need that company's instance in order to send a message. Mastodon was designed so that, in this express situation, the entire network does not collapse. Twitter did not anticipate it early enough.
People are certainly misplacing their hopes in Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. That's not Mastodon's fault or problem, though. It's a framing device that sets people up for disappointment, and then sends them back to HN/Twitter/Facebook to complain again.
Twitter is certainly doing fine, but that's because betting against the intelligence of the average Twitter user is always a winning bet. Who knows though, maybe one day the internet at-large will learn that trusting a private entity with significant cultural presence always ends bad. Maybe once YouTube capsizes.
I'm highly doubtful any Twitter-like platform could succeed in the next 5-10 years. You need entirely new experiences to attract people.
Especially for the younger generations, they dont tend to stay and invest their time building profiles in just one or two social media, they use it all. There's no such dedicated efforts to "move." Only what is popular and trendy.
All the ones I have seen are not even 1/10 of Twitter size so your potential reach is tiny.
Not to mention mastodon is too complicated to sign up for.
Also, "too complicated" is a reach on a site full of people who deal with the arcane bullshit of programming all day. It isn't that difficult. At a minimum, pick an instance and fill out a form on their website (eg: https://mastodon.social/) and bookmark each one. Or get any third-party client. Plenty of "non-technical" people have figured it out.
As for Mastodon, I did sign up a long time ago, but when it is too complicated I mean it is too complicated, not that it is insurmountably complicated.
As for your pick an instance, you have to research them all, figure out which will let you follow others and which has sane mods.
Which is all way too much. Until picking the instance with Mastodon doesn't matter (either it is trivial to move between instances or there is a clear winner so everybody picks it), it will stop way more people from signing up.
I don't really care to argue this point: it is well known that if there are more fields on a form, fewer people will complete it.
No you don't. No one does this. No one needs to do this. You can literally just find an instance you like and join it. If it doesn't work out, you can leave. It's not even that hard to export all of your follows on Twitter and import them. More difficult than on other social media platforms? Yes, but only because those platforms don't allow it.
> Until picking the instance with Mastodon doesn't matter (either it is trivial to move between instances or there is a clear winner so everybody picks it), it will stop way more people from signing up.
You don't even have to pick an instance. I have a separate account on multiple instances, many people do. This isn't a zero-sum game, instances aren't competing against one another. No one has to pick a winner.
>it is well known that if there are more fields on a form, fewer people will complete it.
The form for every instance I've seen is no more complicated than elsewhere. Pick a name and password, maybe a note to say why you want to join. Millions of people fill out more complicated forms all the time.
I understand this is the popular wisdom from having seen numerous threads about Mastodon, Peertube, etc. around here, and I've even made the argument about it being too complicated for most users myself. But practice doesn't seem to be bearing that out.
The issue here, to me, is whether something can count as a "replacement" for Twitter unless it replaces it entirely. A lot of people on HN seem to believe that unless you have a single service that captures the entirety of Twitter's userbase then you aren't a "serious" contender, but I would disagree. Another poster here has argued that we're seeing a paradigm shift away from monolithic services towards fragmentation, and I think that's true, and has been taking place long before Musk and his Twitter shenanigans. Nowadays, people use Twitter and numerous other platforms, Discord, in-game services, etc. Twitter's network effect means less when all of your friends are also on a dozen other services, and identities are generally distributed.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that Mastodon is a replacement for Twitter even if it is only for some people.
Then we would have to discuss what it means to be a replacement. Netflix is a replacement for TV, Facetime can be for a phone call, but can HN be a replacement for TV?
It seems to me that the answer is it depends on what you are using Twitter for: for me it is interesting conversations (even if one-way) with interesting people, for you it may be getting the most reach for the most people, or to keep up with the indoor-climbing community.
I suspect the later might be something Masterdon is especially useful for.