https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947674

From the number of Playstore votes it seems quite a few?

Will be interesting to see if it stays that way. Or if they can somehow cheat their way out of it and get all recent ratings deleted or something.

Any guesses?

The missing piece is that social networks are not about publishing your thoughts ideas or knowledge, they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.

Social networks push opinions into people's face, it promotes, markets and advertises messages in ways that people can't avoid reading even if they're not looking for it.

They're not designed to make accessible information for those looking for it, but to allow you to advertise yourself and your ideas to others. And definitely not designed in any way to filter for accurate and high quality information.

What social networks do is make it really easy to voluntarily subscribe to propaganda and be subjected to it day in/day out. It's bonkers when you think about it that we all agree to participate in this.

It might even be profitable to start a venture that allows complete easy self hosting of content.

Wasn’t Berners-Lee working on something like this with his pods?

You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment.

Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture.

A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones.

Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.