Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit had an API?)
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which is the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.
What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
> one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas
Which one are you referring to?
EVERYBODY on twitter is influenced by the CEO because what he chooses to display in the algorithm is what it SHOWS YOU. How do people still not get this? It's IN THE WATER. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE NAZI CHILDPORN ON THE NAZI CHILDPORN SITE EVEN IF IT'S SUBTLE.
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
Why people feel the need to defend / make up excuses for a lying, unlikable, nazi symphasizing, misogynistic billionaire is beyond me. He doesn’t like you back, you know.
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
It clearly wasn't a Nazi salute, but you'll believe anything if it discredits people you don't like, so no amount of logic or evidence will change your mind.
There are pictures of Taylor Swift doing the same gesture, etc. The premise is exactly the same: a vague hand gesture doesn't mean he supports Nazism. You can't distill a vague gesture like that and try to claim it's irrefutable evidence of someone's beliefs, it's nonsense and you know it.
Elon has repeatedly stated he does not support Nazism in any way, yet that doesn't mean a thing to you because it goes against the picture you're so desperate to paint. You intentionally ignore it, which makes you dishonest.
Why don't you give equal credibility to his statements that outright deny that he supports Nazism, rather than cling to a single vague gesture that he clarified had nothing to do with it?
Oh, right. Because you only accept evidence that fits your narrative.
Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it
We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?
I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
Yes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.
We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
You're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.
This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.
There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
How is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.
People are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
I don't know what all that's about, but the day-to-day experience is that you can find a wide range of opinions on X and a much narrower range on alternatives. I don't think a lot of people who aren't already on these alternatives are in favor of restricting the range of expressed opinions.
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other
Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.
Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.
Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”
Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
The internet we had in the 90's and early 00's was amazing. Everything felt free, indie, hackable, composable, ingestible. You didn't worry about platforms because most platforms exposed their data via friendly APIs (remember when Reddit had an API?)
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Thankfully, I'm starting to feel that AI models are going to let us tear down the walls. We can easily spin up indie experiments again in our spare hours after work and do a lot of neat stuff. It feels like the late 90's / early 00's again.
I think the biggest mistake Google made was developing AI, which is the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
I was so sad when they’re acquired by the FB. It was a great platform
For a while after the acquisition you could syndicate your external blog's RSS feed into your Facebook profile. Didn't take long for that to get the axe.
What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.
Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.
atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.
If millions of people don't feel nazi salutes is reasons enough to move on, then what do you expect to accomplish by force?
The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side.
When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are.
If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky.
Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
Doesn’t Musk’s twitter prevent you from saying ‘cisgender’?
Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither.
> one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas
Which one are you referring to?
EVERYBODY on twitter is influenced by the CEO because what he chooses to display in the algorithm is what it SHOWS YOU. How do people still not get this? It's IN THE WATER. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE NAZI CHILDPORN ON THE NAZI CHILDPORN SITE EVEN IF IT'S SUBTLE.
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
Why people feel the need to defend / make up excuses for a lying, unlikable, nazi symphasizing, misogynistic billionaire is beyond me. He doesn’t like you back, you know.
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice.
These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
Well, considering that never actually happened...
He made the "my heart goes out to you" motion (thump your hand over your heart, then fling it out towards the audience), people took a static image of the last part of it, and left out the context to create outrage bait for clicks.
Nothing in that comment mentions force?
Figuring out how to make people actually care, and also figuring out how to make migration easier would both be a big deal.
Maybe forcing the platforms to make it possible to make followers/following portable would be worth it though.
One thing that's a occasionally annoying (because I deleted my account) but understandable is that a lot of the non-English speakers have stayed on X because it's easy for them to ignore the Nazis.
It clearly wasn't a Nazi salute, but you'll believe anything if it discredits people you don't like, so no amount of logic or evidence will change your mind.
There are pictures, dude. What is wrong with you?
There are pictures of Taylor Swift doing the same gesture, etc. The premise is exactly the same: a vague hand gesture doesn't mean he supports Nazism. You can't distill a vague gesture like that and try to claim it's irrefutable evidence of someone's beliefs, it's nonsense and you know it.
Elon has repeatedly stated he does not support Nazism in any way, yet that doesn't mean a thing to you because it goes against the picture you're so desperate to paint. You intentionally ignore it, which makes you dishonest.
Why don't you give equal credibility to his statements that outright deny that he supports Nazism, rather than cling to a single vague gesture that he clarified had nothing to do with it?
Oh, right. Because you only accept evidence that fits your narrative.
The real question is, what's wrong with you?
That’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network.
Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it
Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days
This was tried with clubhouse and that kind of failed miserably. I think those days are likely over.
We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.
Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.
It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!
There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".
But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".
I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.
I really enjoy the "federated platforms are too difficult to use" voices on HN. Quite the hackers these guys!
I feel your pain, but what about "centralized but under control of a non-profit"? Could Wikipedia/Wikimedia serve as an example of such a model?
Wikipedia has a whole lot of problems, you just don't notice them, because the media isn't interested in shining a spotlight on it like they do with other platforms and the drama that happens there is fairly well hidden, despite being openly accessible for the most part.
People have also been conditioned to mostly trust whatever is on Wikipedia despite years of efforts to hammer it into people that this is not an okay assumption.
It would be better for there to be a bunch of Wikis that are competing with each other evenly. Having only Wikipedia is not a healthy thing.
I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go.
Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.
People want to be on platforms where their friends already are. Its a hard problem to solve because how do you get their friends to move onto your platform when they're people too and have the same desire?
Well that's the exact premise of adversarial compatibility. You just scrape the platform their friends are on and cross-post.
All you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though.
I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.
And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.
What you're describing exists: Its called AT-Protocol and runs Bluesky. See more: https://overreacted.io/open-social/
Yes but on the scale of traditional social media sites' account populations, AT users are currently a rounding error. And sites aren't required to provide federation.
Having a protocol is not enough. You need also to be in a position to mandate that all the social media company over a certain size adopt it
The platform is the people, not the tech.
We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.
Yes - that is indeed a problem.
The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.
You're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.
I find it hilarious that folks still consider Musk to be pro free speech.
He has shown time and again that the underlying philosophy is “free speech for me, but not for thee”…
…or more specifically “don’t tell me (and people who agree with me) what we can or can’t say”, while actively censoring opposition.
He does this without believing he is abandoning a “free speech absolutist” stance.
Blind hypocrisy? Unrestrained privilege? Both? Something else? Not sure.
This is true. Why would anyone not establishment liberal go to BlueSky? I'm playing with Nostr but these decentralized social media platforms are a no go for 90% of people. Now I'm wondering why we're talking about Twitter or political social media in general in 2026. That's long over with. Move on.
You’re an absolute helmet if you actually believe what you wrote.
There are instances full of actual Nazis on Mastodon - that we can choose to refuse to interact with those instances (yes, I've blocked a nazi instance on my instance) does not prevent them from talking amongst themselves or to people who want to talk to them.
Censorship is not refusing to listen to people we find abusive. People are not entitled to force me to listen.
A federated platform is far more resistant to censorship than X is.
How is it not censorship if you are making the decision for not only yourself, but others, too? It sounds like saying bleeping swear words on TV isn't censorship because you just don't want to hear bad language.
People are choosing to be on instances which block certain things. That's their choice. I want to be able to have a conversation without filling it with racist screaming. Choosing to be in places that don't allow that is my choice.
We're talking about the "free-speech platform" that bans words like "cis" and "cisgender"?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats...
The platform that randomly banned journalists for using Substack?
https://newrepublic.com/post/179067/twitter-files-matt-taibb...
The same platform that banned left-wing journalists because they were criticizing Musk?
https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-journalists-f...
I don't know, it sounds like there's some very good reasons to move away from a centralized platform where the owner can randomly decide he doesn't like you and ban you.
I don't know what all that's about, but the day-to-day experience is that you can find a wide range of opinions on X and a much narrower range on alternatives. I don't think a lot of people who aren't already on these alternatives are in favor of restricting the range of expressed opinions.
they came with verifiable sources and you come with your own "day-to-day experience", quite myopic
I feel like setting up the social media is a solved problem. And while getting users is hard, if you hook up to the fediverse, you can piggy back off other Platforms. I think the harder problem is making it profitable
Reading between the lines it appears that the only argument twitter had is that they could not enforce content moderation due to the archival nature of nitter. Pretty cool to see that archival sites cannot get C&D'd that easily!
Correct me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty sure they could get away with this because nitter is not an archival software, but rather a frontend or alternative twitter proxy.
duplicate of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589003
Sorry, didn‘t see it in the search before I submitted it
Why do people feel the need to go to X so strongly? What am I missing? I don't use nitter or X
A surprising number of official bodies use it (and only it) for realtime updates. e.g. for a very long time the only way to get the latest updates on the NYC subway was to follow their account on there.
More broadly, it’s a platform where prominent people say noteworthy things. I don’t think it’s surprising people want to read it.
Network effects are really powerful.
Same reason at least one person in your company has a windows machine with a copy of excel, even though its a locked in platform which is paid and opaque: its what everyone else uses.
That doesn't really explain why people went there, only why they stay. I remember back in 2006 when Twitter was new and I still couldn't figure out why anyone wanted to use it. So I never did, to this day.
Because unfortunately people still post things on X that I find relevant, even if I don't use the platform much, and pragmatism wins over pure principles.
Sometimes it's hard to avoid.
One small service provider I use updates its X/Facebook status much faster than its official status page during outages. There can be a gap of a few hours.
Links mostly. To organization or government agencies or whatever official that shares updates only in one place. (Which is bad)
Total defeat of Elon "I have too much money" Musk.
Now we need an alternative that works well and is de-centralized from the get go.
This is great news!
Lawsuits and cease and desists should never exist for software. I've just seen 10 more instances go live, you can't just go and sue everyone in the world.
It makes no sense to do this to an OSS community project just trying to provide information for free.
I hope as a society we stop censoring projects by using shallow and evil tactics like this.