Ask HN: Why isn't anyone creating or promoting an alternative to Twitter?

I wonder how much people are secretly just hoping Twitter dies with no replacement. Skepticism about social media is basically the default position for educated professionals now, who are likely to already have distanced themselves from Facebook. The Twitter users I know would be happy to get rid of it, if not for the perceived career benefits (likewise with LinkedIn). When Twitter no longer offers any ladder-climbing benefits for technocrats, it will degenerate to be a shittier cousin of Instagram.

KptMarchewa · 3 years ago

I want to have place where I can follow some people's written content without being "friends" with them.

lithos · 3 years ago

You already can with bookmarks/favorites. There's also the somewhat murdered RSS protocol.

bitlax · 3 years ago

I follow Nitter feeds with Thunderbird.

exoterictruth · 3 years ago

What about ladder-climbing benefits for artists?

Deleted Comment

Moissanite · 3 years ago

Not being an artist, I have no idea if this is a thing - but if so, I suppose the same logic applies; except I would expect artists to also be able to get value from photo/video content on Instagram or Tiktok to a much greater extent than technology workers.

Well, there's Mastodon, of course.

I'm kind of surprised that whoever owns Tumblr this week isn't pushing it harder; Tumblr is, when it comes to it, more or less twitter without the character limit and with a much worse mobile app (most Twitter features were effectively copied from Tumblr).

That said, I'm not sure that there needs to be a single direct replacement for Twitter; historically, when a social network dies, generally it isn't replaced by a direct clone but by different things.

r0bfelty · 3 years ago

Actually, Tumblr has been hard at work promoting itself as an alternative to Twitter. Did you know that you can buy 2 blue check marks on Tumblr for only $7.99?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/elon-...

metadat · 3 years ago

Have you actually tried mastodon? It's really slow. I want it to be good but the UX just sucks. I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement,

Note how few HN submissions point to masto posts, it's ~ 10,000:1 Tweets:Masto.

rsynnott · 3 years ago

> Have you actually tried mastodon?

Yeah, I've largely moved over to Mastodon; most of the people I was most interested in following on Twitter are now there, so...

> It's really slow.

That's very instance-dependent. The one I use is pretty fast, certainly faster than Twitter these days (I note that loading timelines is no longer as snappy as it used to be.) I did previously use mastodon.online, and it was borderline unusably slow, granted.

> I want it to be good but the UX just sucks.

The UX is a mix of good and bad. It has a linear time-based feed with no helpful "suggestions", like Twitter a decade ago, which I would consider good. The UX around following people on other instances is bad (button to redirect you to your own instance) to comically bad (link to paste into your instance's search box) depending on instance setup...

> I hate to say it, but so far it's a different nature of beast which is not a viable Twitter replacement,

It is different, and it's certainly not a replacement for _all_ Twitter usecases, but it's largely good enough for me; I'm mostly now using Twitter just to observe the implosion of Twitter.

I doubt that, in five years, Mastodon will be the Twitter replacement. There may not be a single Twitter replacement. But it solves a decent subset of the things that Twitter solved for people, in a way that is in some ways nicer than Twitter (it never suggests that I follow weird Nazis, for instance).

mattdesl · 3 years ago

There are a lot of alternatives popping up: BlueSky, Mastodon, Farcaster, nostr. There are also some older protocols that people are still building on like secure scuttlebutt.

I've written about some of the differences of these protocols here:

https://mirror.xyz/mattdesl.eth/_F9vQAUeeBB9AJNwMNaE_G5kTcl1...

elsherbini · 3 years ago

That was a good read for me - someone who has heard of Mastondon and ActivityPub but hasn't really grokked the tech and definitely didn't know other alternatives.

codingdave · 3 years ago

Honestly, because I don't see what problem Twitter is solving in the first place. Twitter popped into our reality as the winner in a time when social media was launching and everyone wanted to be a voice on the internet. And for that it works and thrives on its own momentum. But I'm not sure being a voice on the internet is actually a problem the needs a solution now that social media has matured and many people are backing away from it.

jstx1 · 3 years ago

Sure social media has matured but there are still millions of people who use twitter so the demand is clearly still out there.

arcbyte · 3 years ago

There are thousands of people who post on titter and millions who just use it as an unimportant and replaceable news stream.

madelyn-goodman · 3 years ago

It's interesting because I don't know if it's possible for anything to truly replace Twitter. I think what will happen is people will splinter off into online forums where they feel most comfortable based on the level of moderation on each site and who is there. Twitter was unique in that everyone was on it, sadly I don't think we'll ever have that again.

anony23 · 3 years ago

Because Twitter is fine. If you ignore the fud, the experience on Twitter hasn't changed at all.

The probability of bankruptcy is rising the longer Musk is in control which would likely cause it to shut down completely!

pier25 · 3 years ago

How many companies has Musk bankrupted?

geenat · 3 years ago

Everyones too busy building a note taking app.

rrgok · 3 years ago

Or the new database or the programming language.

durnygbur · 3 years ago

Hey! my framework/language/app will be different because I'm smart.

Google returned better search results than Yahoo, and Reddit was objectively a better experience than Digg 2.0. The move was a positive experience for the entire userbase and that isn't true for any of the current crop of Twitter alternatives.