Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.

>“You know — “ said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”

“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”

“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”

“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

=========

Your solution is somewhat similar. You want to solve the problem of people saying racist things, so you decide to destroy the public square. Going for the root of the problem, I suppose.

"Public Square" online is a fallacy. A public square is typically thought of where someone grabs the attention of all passerby and is voicing their thoughts. Those thoughts voiced are short lived and can only be broadcast as far as the sound wave will carry them. Social media like twitter allows millions of people to spread their thoughts, commentary and keep them semi-permanently online for a long time, decade or more.

I never stated I was solving the problem of people saying racist things. I'm challenging the assumption that designing a new social media platform should repeat existing designs that have public content with public comments driven by advertisements. In my opinion if someone designs with that premise it will end up the same as the existing social media platforms we have today (with a side effect of new JS frameworks being borne).

Is this the only product design Tech has: public content and sell advertisements?

That's very true. Maybe a better Twitter could incorporate actual geographical distance. You would have to choose where you are and could only see messages from people that are actually near you. If you move, you see different messages.

Or the distance could be ideological -- or better, theoretical.

Any user would have to choose a place on a "map" / a set of coordinates. A user can move freely at any time, but

- messages can't move and stay where the user was when they were posted

- messages can only be seen when the user is near them.

Tempted to say the problem is just the internet breeding toxicity in general. Maybe we could all do better with less internet and more nature time

In my idea the place itself would be neutral/non-significant, and you could only be in one place at a time, like IRL.

There's something to be said for this. Schools have their problems. Plenty of drama, bullying, harassment, marginalization, extremism. But when it's limited to a school network, it doesn't swing national sentiment, aid and abet genocides, provide an outlet for foreign adversaries to subvert race relations in your country.

But it does mean ad campaigns can't have global reach.

Reddit has this a bit with subreddits but it's far more loose and indexed by search engines, which I think is why it is problematic in certain ways.

and if you're a crazy person or verbally abusive or maybe just shouting things that while maybe true are insulting to the public morality then the police come and carry you away.

You can argue if this is good or bad, but it’s a fundamental difference between the public square and digital recreations: in the real world, speech can have meaningful consequences. In the Twitter world, you create a new profile.

I disagree that it's a fallacy, the issue is that platforms have an interest in claiming themselves to be a public square. But the platform is not the square THE INTERNET, which is to say the open World Wide Web, is the public square. Platforms are the individual bars and pubs and cafes that line the squares and boulevards.

Each cafe and pub has the right to set its own rules for entry and set its own vibe and culture, but when there is an oligopoly of bars who are all megalomaniacs wanting to own the whole thing and keep people locked in their establishments for as long as possible, that does not lend itself to having a healthy community or vibe in any one of them.

Let people self-segregate and affiliate with the communities they want to. The racist shitheads will find their spaces, but they only start to multiply when they're able to wheedle their fearmongering propaganda in front of people who wouldn't otherwise want anything to do with them.

The problem with this approach is group polarization [0], the tendency for groups with similar opinions to become more extreme and entrenched over time. The danger posed by bigots is not just from their numbers, but also the degree of violence used to enforce their bigotry. In addition, having pre-established communication makes it easier to organize violence, even with a small proportion of the population.

I don't have a solution to these problems, as much as I wish I did, but wanted to bring them up as issues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

Sure some people will go down the rabbit hole anyway, but then they will limit their reach by virtue of being too extreme to appeal to "normal" or moderate people who don't think about this stuff too deeply and are put off by extremism reflexively. When things are more centralized, there's sort of a one-way ratcheting effect where you get exposed to mild versions of the thing enough to start getting into it, and then slowly get pulled into more and more extreme versions. That doesn't happen with forums that each have their own culture and identity, there isn't as much transitional/interstitial space to acclimatize you. You just jump in, read the vibe without being preconditioned, and make your instinctual call on whether you'd like to stay.

Enabling good ideas to spill out of their origin communities into general public discourse is the main point of "public square" and "free speech" concepts.

Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have. That's ok.

That way, you get to not hear racist stuff, and I get to not have my morality chosen by random americans.

I’m sure there are taverns near any reader here where one could “say the wrong things” and be asked to leave or maybe roughed up or even worse. Those consequences might be an important part of this not-really-discourse-or-free-speech-but-we-want-to-treat-it-like-free-speech.

Hard to say what the best thing is. Huge parts of our society don’t like consequences for actions.

There's something particularly disgusting about the elevated sense of self-importance required to say that because you don't like something, because there is a vanishingly small number of bad actors as there are in every single group above a certain size, it shouldn't exist at all.

There's no digital analogue to the IRL long stare of death that is elicited when someone is out of line. Downvotes, ratios, and whatever ridiculous thing people invent aren't effective enough because the offender has little concern for being ostracized from a group of people they don't even know. It's all just avatars on a screen yelling at each other. This is why people say scale is the problem. Smaller communities can more effectively enforce norms because they create a localized culture, there is less to moderate, and they can more effectively identify and punish bad actors.

These days I spend time on niche forums where people actively choose to be there and participate. There's no Internet Points to be gamed, no drama of the day, no personal brands to be pushing. It's absolutely refreshing. It moves slower, there's no sense of FOMO, it's not made to suck your attention span dry.

Twitter is rotting: it's why the front page has to tell you it is relevant, and why they started requiring logins to read beyond a thread. It'd be farther gone if journalists didn't prop it up as a way to do their job faster.

A phrase particularly lacking in decency, making you a bad actor on this forum. Especially when you are wrong. It takes an elevated sense of self-importance to say that because you don't like a moderate opinion it is palpably revolting.

Twitter isn't a technical problem, as others have pointed out. It is a social problem. One that leads to behavior just as intolerant and dvisive as Fox News or any of the demagogues making their fortunes by bringing out the worst impulses of the stupidest people. One that leads people like yourself to drag down the discussion with such uncalled for invective.

Trying to discuss the problem invariably brings out dim outbursts, such as your own, meant to stifle discourse. Yes you feel entitled to your own set of rules and care little for the effect it has on others, but the effect of Twitter is destroying the fabric that coddles you, that protects you and allows you to have small selfish views at the expense of everyone else, with no evidence that you understand the consequences.

| You're not required to participate. Nobody is, in fact.

As long as Twitter remains a powerful platform for social influence - even if you explicitly avoid participation - you face the effects. Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents. The problem extends to many other nations. Something should be done and discussing it freely is a sane approach.

So choke down your bile, bite your tongue and make your points with some dignity. If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.

> a moderate opinion

> > Maybe global public squares don't work for the humans we have.

Tenuous argument that Twitter === "global public square" notwithstanding, saying some people don't warrant a public square is not a moderate opinion. It's borderline fascist, and disgusting is the most civil word I would use to describe it.

> Nobody in the U.S. can escape the grandstanding, the vitriol, the ostracizing, or the influence that the forum represents.

Oh please. If you're not on Twitter what does the ratioing or "ostracizing" do to your day to day? Even if you are, unless you're commonly delving into hot button topics or conversations between people you don't follow, there is very little drama unless you want there to do. I almost exclusively follow people I haven't met in real life, who are doing cool things in the tech space. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been subject to either grandstanding or vitriol, and I'm fairly active on the platform.

> If we all pull together we can get through this, I just know it.

Get through what? Musk buying Twitter isn't some apocalyptic event. Unless you're the type of sad person who gets their entire sense of self worth from having a little blue check mark next to your name, or you think it's generally a bad thing that people have a place to speak their mind, this will almost certainly be a complete non-issue. Have some dignity.

Then again, the solution to the hooligan yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre isn't to close the theatre...

Where is the elevated sense of self importance? Where did OP say it shouldn't exist. You read this with filters.

OP simply stated that we need to build a product which is more aligned with how humans are and NOT how we wish humans were. A rebuttal would be to show that current products solve the problem we have and we do not need to change anything.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that moderation is absolutely required for any "public square". You can't have society without some agreed-upon rules.

The real question is where are the lines, and how do you police them (and who polices the police, etc etc). It's not like we haven't solved those. It's just that the solutions themselves are imperfect like the world we live in.

No. You want moderation, because you don't want people saying The Bad Things™, but it's not an absolute property of all discussion.

Otherwise - you're missing the point that GP wants to destroy twitter in it's current form because we don't need a public square. It's not a matter of where we draw the lines for moderation.

Not that the IRL public square is immune to rule-breaking. In the heat of the moment, a mob can do horrendous things in a flash.

In terms of human groups, we've traditionally dealt with this by means of hierarchies (with all the built-in shortcomings).

Personally, I find a homogenous mob terrifying. Being in agreement with millions of others implies that the subject of the agreement is extremely basic and common (like "we all need air to breathe").

You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.

150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of course.

I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.

There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military.

> In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level.

Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...

I will checkout this blog, maybe it has some posts about non-military initiatives also.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Army_Co...

For example in a group of 3 me bill and Alice I can model bills view of me and Alice alone, me and Alice together, me Alice and bill together, etc etc

Beyond a certain number it's not really possible.

I also discovered in searching that you're talking about David Graeber. I recently read his "Bullshit Jobs" book because someone on here cited it. It was one of the worst books I've ever read. It was clearly a contrived political manifesto (I suppose for "anarchy") with the thinnest veneer of popular science wrapped around it. I think ancient aliens probably got more anthropology correct.

So if you're going to appeal to an authority instead of actually transmitting the argument yourself then David Graeber seems like probably one of the worst you could pick to cite.

You don't have to shut them down, you know. The British Government did this all throughout the 1970s to 1990s, where pubs (and later online services) where Republican terrorists hung out were very much left alone. They could have swooped in and scooped the lot up, but they didn't.

Because if they ever did want to scoop them all up, they knew exactly where to look, and why would you disturb that?

Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.

Sorry for being a prick; but the royal 'we' is the exact opposite of the 'we' in all of humanity. Royal 'we' is when the speaker refers to him-or-herself with the first-person plural pronoun, as was common among sovereigns ("we the Emperor of the French"). These days most commonly seen in academic articles, where single authors refer to themselves as "we" for some reason.

They mean "we" as in "you (the reader) and I (the author)". "We can see that", etc. It's as if the author is a guide on a journey.

I am convinced that the presence of authorities on social media has to be regulated, and if I were to launch an alternative to Twitter I would consider [and look for ways to] build ethical safeguards [concerning public officials] into the system.

Well, I can't give an answer from a legal point of view, because I'm looking for it myself. But in various instances of life we see the requirement of formality between authorities and the public. In fact, all public interaction with the state is formal.

Here's a problem: the state has a set of international commitments, but the head of that state makes personal statements that go against the very official line of the government he leads [the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil]. Catalyzed by the dynamics of the network This quickly turns into another front of disinformation. The public is completely at the mercy of the machinations of the powerful entity.

I don't think there is anything in the Republican rules that precludes proper legislation on this subject.

[1] https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Making it even easier to register domain names. Rebuilding your friend network between the DNS names of friends, family and other associates. Sharing photos and videos and birthday reminders.

I feel like it's marketing all of the technologies of the early web that enabled these things, but with great UX and an order of magnitude less complexity for getting all of it setup.

Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve

Having a DNS domain is akin to going into a public town square and setting up your stall selling whatever vegetables you grew in your garden. But just as the individual farmers were run over by large corporations who invented the hyper-market, just as so the individual users have been fleeing, increasingly in the past 15 years, to be under the umbrella of big-corp-du-jour.com. Making another-service.com with the façade of a "public town square" is just making another hypermarket.

And also, it's called a "public town square", with accent on town, as in "group of houses" [1], because it's meant for a relatively small population. There is perhaps a reason we don't have "public megacity squares" (stampedes and crowd crushes aside). And there is perhaps something inherently wrong when an individual has 100+ million "followers": in a public town square a stall could not sell vegetables to 100+ million people since there aren't that many people in the town in the first place.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=town

A public square is "an open public area in a city or town where people gather". DNS is far too abstract to even remotely resemble a public square--just like "capitalism" or "zoning laws" are too abstract to resemble a public square.

Nor is foo.com a digital public square (just like your house isn't a physical public square). Public squares (digital and physical) are places where people already gather.

And yes, precisely, "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", cannot, by definition, be digital public squares: they are just stalls, booths, were we go and check certain vegetables.

the town = the TCP/IP suite of protocols (UDP, QUIC, etc. included)

the public town square = DNS

a booth selling vegetables in the public town square = a domain, "foo.com", publishing whatever their opinion is about reality and everything else

A great lie told again and again by "social media" domains is that they are "platforms", but a platform is meant to sustain something else beyond itself. "foo.com", "twitter.com" are merely individual booths, where all the value is owned by the person/company owning that domain, irregardless of how "easy" it is to "post" on "foo.com" and how difficult it is to setup a new booth/domain on DNS: DNS is that platform we have been hearing ad nauseam.

And even more, a domain, such as "foo.com", or "twitter.com", or "tiktok.com", is fundamentally someone's estate, owned by a master [1]: it's a glaringly obvious contradiction in terms to say that a domain could ever be a "public town square".

Entering and adding value to someone else's domain is akin to belonging to a feudal master, a technofeudalism if you will [2]. And some tehnofeuds are great, I personally enjoy "github.com", but believing that "github.com" is a "public town square" for code, not backing up your work in other places, it's at the very least irresponsible.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/domain#etymonline_v_13918

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMSNpq4K67o

DNS itself (in the form that gets used publicly) is controlled by a few actors -- arguably the 'true' owners of all the domains that are leased from them. This is underscored every time new TLDs are released and people have to scramble to secure their names and brands. In that context alone, DNS also can't qualify as the public square.

Discoverability and noise filtering are the hard problem.

However, now, after we, the users, have created such Leviathans [1] as Google, Meta, and so on, we, the developers, must go back to the drawing board and solve discoverability, noise filtering, payments [2], and much more at the protocol level. Which is not even a new or outrageous idea, even Mr. Jack Dorsey seems to agree to this [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

"But, but, what about filter bubbles / echo chambers???" one says. To which I say "it's not a problem I'm trying to solve, or particularly interested in. I'm not even sure that's actually a problem per-se to begin with." Seriously, the world is too big, there are too many people and too many ideas, for any one of us to accept being exposed to everything that's "out there".

Filters are a good thing, in fact a necessary thing. Of course we'd like to think that in a well educated, civilized, rational society, people would choose to make some effort to gain exposure to new and contradictory ideas for the purpose of expanding their minds and adapting and learning and what-not. But be that as it may, you still have to accept that some people will choose to filter out things to a lesser or greater degree than some others, and that some people will choose to filter things differently than you will. And that's OK.

- Does LinkedIn show us that people have less hostile posts if their real world professional connections are watching? If Twitter tried to show your posts to people it thinks you know, whether or not you follow each other, would we all be more civil?

- Does the higher bar of needing to generate an image or video to post (and a 2nd class presentation of comments) on some platforms, and lack of explicit 'reply' functionality stop arguments or bickering? The bar of typing a post in Twitter is just too low?

- Does TikTok's recommendation based on behavior rather than "interests" create less polarized bubbles? Showing you a funny dance video just because it knows you'll watch it may disrupt you from seeking out The Enemy just to disagree with them.

- Does removing an asymmetric "follow" relationship in favor of symmetrical "connections" disarm people whose hobby is having incendiary positions? If you can only have more "audience" by opening yourself up to see stuff from more people, do you then choose to connect with people that add value rather than valuing followers who will amplify you?

It’s a much harder problem to fix. There are some partial solutions, IMO. Although none are all that practical to implement.

The answer to this question seems almost implicit for you, but it's far from obvious to me.

Why would advertisers prefer public town squares? They just want people to see their ads.

(I also like "public town square" places, as a user)

No, the adverts are going to go in your private posts and messages, so you have to see the advert before you get the message.

Like this one.

I don't have a problem with the local public town square, but I do agree that giving equal voice to all the bad ideas, while also making it easier for those with bad ideas to find each other, is dangerous. It's made more dangerous in an era where our elected leaders also say bad ideas out loud, which emboldens others to do the same. Even in a public square, you can't just yell "fire" without consequence.

It wouldn't be the same cost. Publishers charge advertisers in proportion to the number of people who see the ad.

Twitter is part of that fragmentation, but it also accomplished something decent that competitors like Reddit don't: while there are individual communities, the follow interface made them somewhat porous. People can slide into conversations or get boosted by just about anyone. Making this work without local "subreddit-style moderators" was really technically remarkable, just from a spam perspective. Making moderation work to the point where a company could actually run advertising was extremely impressive.

I don't know what you're calling for exactly, but it sounds a whole lot more fragmented than what Twitter accomplished. I don't know that this will be a better outcome.

But no one blinks an eye. So HatefulRacistUncle might be “HorriblyMisguidedAndRacistYoungCollegeStudent” and that’s also not ok to some of us.

So who polices this? Maybe we just go back to not reading things we dislike. You can block people on Twitter ya know.

Why do we have to do that? Isn't the idea of having easy access for all enough? What people are so marginalized that they can't mute hateful speech and get on with their day?

I'm not sure if all of Twitter's problems come from mere scale; it suffers from what analyst Ben Thompson has called the Pollyannaish Assumption: we focus on the upsides of the "global public square" without accurately evaluating the downsides, and bluntly, I see this a lot in discussions on HN. It's the subtext of "why can't people just block and move on." Arguably, focusing on the downsides without accurately evaluating the upsides, which I also increasingly see a lot on HN, isn't really an improvement -- but if we're going to have platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the question of "what do you do about harassment, hate speech, and stochastic terrorism on those platforms" needs a better answer than "suck it up, buttercup."

You are correct to point out the downsides and dangers of "public square" platform, but we haven't really even started trying to implement any reasonable solutions to them.

to add to your point: 1/ tech stack/architecture isn't #1 or even #10 issue. think everyone (all) agree on this 2/ larger issue is how to handle open discourse. given how we are wired as species, is there a social network that is truly open that doesn't descend into vitriol? if so - what behaviors are rewarded, what are the policies etc. - this is #1 question

What's interesting is what value Twitter gives and what could a new platform target? For me, there's a slice of Twitter users that provide information, entertainment, and context that I can't get elsewhere. This could be something from a mid-level analyst re: market volatility or a college professor at a small Canadian university on Chinese politics. These people aren't consistent enough or polished enough to have established means of amplifying their opinions (a blog, newsletter, podcast, etc.) though they have so much domain expertise. Where do you find them? On Twitter. The low friction posting encourages them to share.

If I could get rid of the celebrities, the thought leaders, the self marketers, the low content hate, and the bots, and only be left with the above in a moderated environment I'd welcome this global town square.

Sadly many of those people come for the self-marketers and thought leaders though.

I've noticed this in Reddit too. A lot of posters in places like AskHistorians and AskScience have left, questions just don't get answered as much anymore and the quality of responses has gone way down. I expect those people came for the memes and interesting articles (and maybe /r/GoneWild) and participated in this value additive stuff while they happened to be around. But as Reddit got less interesting, more focused on memes and political fighting, and generally became less of a fun place to hang out they seem to spend less time on it and post less.

My real life experience is very different - I know a ton of gay Republicans, for example. Most people in a group are not the median, and all the Reddit approach does is alienate anyone that _was_ open to new ideas.

If you really want to build a twitter alternative think about how you would DISTRIBUTE it. How would you get a critical mass on the platform so that is viable, i.e. interesting enough for users to stick around.

Which existing social networks (not media ones, real ones) would you try to capture first? Facebook and Tinder both did the Uni campus strategy quite successfully. Slack did the Bay Area startups strategy. What’s your strategy?

The OP specifically asked about this, and reading the comments a lot of people here evidently do care.

The better question is how to reach people and get them off their insert favourite platform , what makes you unique? What can you do to make sure people start buying into it? What’s your value proposition?

It’s far more a social question than a technology question (still with respect to OP who is interested in the tech)

Please don't leave us hanging. How had you designed it?

I would like to know even more: Did you have integration with other networks via ActivityPub or other protocols?

There is a huge risk of wasting time if I cannot migrate my social network. New services are prone to being discontinued, why should I invest in a new network that locks me in?

I don't understand why not all new networks offer ActivityPub migration by default. Distribution should be much easier.

Because you won’t become the next twitter, you probably won’t regardless….

I think there is more to asking the question than that.

what was it called? now I'm curious.

Communicating via short untargeted messages was always going to be a shitshow, why not let Elon Musk run it if he so desperately wants to?

Database: I’d use whatever you know and helps you get to market, but abstract it away from the rest of your app so you can swap out later. Lots of good choices here; I’d pick mysql or postgres running on rds. I would also design for sharding by user on day 1 because that can be extremely painful to add later, however, care would have to be taken to ensure it doesn’t slow you down too much early. I’d also just use an rdbms for caching unless it becomes a problem, only then would I reach for redis. I would also avoid a fanout-on-write approach in favor of fanout-on-read. It will save you a lot of headaches later.

Firestore is nice but can get expensive quickly so I’d plan for it to be a temporary thing.

2. Would go for a react native app first but there are lots of options to choose from. Go with tech you know but keep in mind that it’s basically impossible to get a AAA mobile experience on web, and in this space polish really matters.

3. Decentralized social networks never took off because they are too hard to build. Avoid at all costs unless you have some angle (ie you have some novel tech discovered during your PhD). A middle ground could be a centralized network that is open source and makes data portability front and center.

I’ll also say that growth matters a lot here. As a founder I think 20% of the teams headspace should be thinking about engineering. The rest on growth and retention.

Probably a bigger benefit though, is being able to use a different DB in production (probably big scale) vs on your personal machine while developing.

So we've just switched underlying connection and fixed a dozen of (mostly reports) places with plain SQL queries with MySQL-specific syntax. ORM library handled rest just perfectly.

So I agree with you with this one important exception.

But I think the point is still valid. You probably don't want your early design to focus on an edge case.

That said, a clear API between your DB and app is worthwhile for a lot of reasons (in general).

React is a decent choice also here because you can port it wherever. One code base for web/iOS/Android is probably critical given how few dev resources you'd want to spend on it (you've got the right idea there too).

Also agree w/r/t decentralization. I think this is a fantasy for nerds but most people really do not care about privacy no matter how much people try to explain it to them.

I guess one thing I would add here is I'd work very hard to minimize operational costs for as long as I can, until you can show the explosive growth that'll interest investors. There are a ton of scrappy ways to save money on a tech stack like this early on, and you can probably find a way to get that AWS/GCP/Azure credit money to basically make this free to operate until your F&F round.

One you have a userbase, just... idk, iterate with them. Everyone and their mother probably has ideas for what they'd like Not-Twitter to be, but finding what the GCD is for that would be important to sustain growth I bet.

Every social web I imagine branches out from me (if I am the user in question) and then goes out to gather information from there. So on and so forth. Unless I'm thinking about the wrong information gathering system.

However this is not something that I've ever done IRL and I rather doubt that most of those who invoke this idea do this regularly either.

The kinds of discussions that you might imagine having in public with strangers who might have different values and backgrounds would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).

While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.

The point of the public square proponents is that it would be nice if one of public platforms would step up to perform the function in a way suitable for it.

On the internet, enforcing the preconditions needed for the town square to work well is difficult at best.

Besides that I'm unconvinced that this kind of platform for spreading new ideas is what most users on Twitter want from Twitter. The metaphor has become repeated so often that it almost sounds like it is Twitter's reason to be but I rather doubt that it was designed with that in mind.

Some thoughts:

- Start with thinking about how you're going to maintain engagement without pushing people into algorithmically-generated echo chambers, or into attack/defence behaviour that will just turn your New Twitter into the same cesspit as Old Twitter.

- Also think about how you're going to moderate content - because you're going to have to do it whether you like it or not, and its going to have to be at various scales from post-level to policy-level. There's a very good argument to be made that Legacy Twitter's product is content moderation [1], not software. Human nature being what it is, you may find that eventually it's your product too.

- Also, consider how you are going to deal with state-level and semi-state-level actors who will attempt to infiltrate your platform to use it as an amplifier.

The tech platform will help with the above, of course, but above all I think you need to consciously design the thing that you're building. That thing isn't a software platform or a social network or a community. It's something else. Figure that out first.

And if you want to build something that makes the world better (as opposed to worse, as in Old Twitter), you might consider how people can use your new platform to get stuff done in the world, rather than just shouting and meme-ing. I wish I knew how to do that though.

If you do build something like Twitter then please try to build it so that it doesn't cause harm.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

Not just state actors but anyone with an agenda and budget really. companies, ngos, political parties etc. Manipulating twitter to push an agenda or narrative is big business and not limited to nation states.

When a social media site runs on ads, it will inevitably begin to shift to being advertiser friendly. When it's a paid site, it will struggle to get users. Might be worth investigating a Patreon or Reddit type funding, where paid users get benefits, awards that can be handed out, message amplification and ad blocking, but where anyone can create an account.

It might be useful to also integrate the Brave browser format where the users get credit for viewing ads that can be traded to other people or spent in an online store for fabulous toys and prizes.

The reason I'm saying all of this is that what an alternative to Twitter needs in order to serve the people is a funding method that does not rely on stocks and shareholders, but that also has a method to manage invasive business practice while remaining profitable. The system should be technically owned by the people and therefore be a place that people would want to gather together without the worry of money having to change hands in order to use it or have a painless experience.

Aside from that, it should offer frictionless open APIs to developers (<- very useful for getting people invested in the platform), it should have a topic filter (for instance, I am not interested in Sports at all, so being able to filter out Sports related topics would vastly improve the experience for me), and in addition to that, there should be a free-for-all town-hall section that removes any filter other than your personal blocklist and does not allow ad/business accounts to post but could have non-targeted generic ad billboards.

That should help minimize echo chambers or at least provide an easy way to step out of your echo chambers without abandoning them.

People need a place to speak and think and breathe without ads and agendas being shoved on them, where ordinary people can speak freely to other people and be evaluated on the quality of their thoughts and posts and not on artificial amplification of weaponized memes and polarizing agendas crafted to serve the financial desires of the wealthy elite.

Also, you can't trust one person (even yourself) to hold the line against the riches and power of the world, you can't trust even an organization founded on the purest of intentions (like Mozilla) to be able to resist both the peaceful and hostile machinations of such people should you reach market saturation.

The company charter would need to be built on principals designed to prevent the consolidation of power and control over the platform into the hands of the few, with some system in place to enable the people to eject other people from the platform entirely. I'm not sure what that would be, maybe every 3 months the top 10-1000 accounts get put to a vote (from verified human account users) and if there are enough votes then those accounts get memorialized and the user has to take 3 months off from the platform and then create a new account.

Sorry for the brain dump, but these are things that might have either improved Twitter or prevented it from becoming a billionaire's plaything and are therefore things I would like to see in whatever rises from its Phoenix Ashes.

The "how" is the absolute last question, the "what" is the first.

Can you imagine the following conversation:

"Hey you should sign up to Facebook!"

"Oh, why?"

"It's got a great tech stack!".

Me nether.

To design an alternative Twitter you must first understand what made Twitter popular in the first place. And then at some point, in the far distant future, let the name of a tech into your head, or a line of code onto your screen.

Said in good faith. I know so many engineers who wasted so much time because they couldn't understand that outside of the constraints of a job their skills had no monetary value by default.

The real question Elon should have asked is what's beyond Twitter, i.e. what should he have built instead of trying to pivot Twitter towards, with all its baggage?

Twitter is Serious Internet Business now. Which is why most of the noise comes from a very few individuals and it is riddled with bots. The value of your opinion is based entirely on your number of followers.

Building an alternative is difficult. Google has tried and failed, multiple times. I think Elon would prefer for it to return to the water cooler days.

People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds.

No server side agorithm and api just returns feeds sorted by users preference.

If I follow too many people to view chronological, then I can have client side algorithms to sort.

Aggregate queries across all the feeds on the server identify hashtag trends and create useful metrics (retweets, likes, etc).

RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional.

The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets.

As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few users like to spread the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/).

But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore, RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage.

Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself.

RSS is an undeniable convenience for readers but its limited scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for writers publishers.

RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is out of scope for RSS.

So whatever can replace Twitter will look like something closer to Twitter than RSS.

EDIT reply to: >That's a client side question, IMHO. If you want your client to show you replies,

I was talking about the RSS-user-themselves wanting the capability to _write_ the replies and not reading others' replies. RSS is not a read+WRITE protocol. It's a pull-based reading protocol.

Also you could add friends and view what they subscribe to and like.

And just a basic text search is useful to find material related to a topic of interest.

I think it’s important to remember that this isn’t meant to consume infinite time but just a way to see what you’ve noted as interesting. I think it’s like a newspaper where you spend 15-60 minutes reading. Not something that consumes every waking moment with infinite discovery and content.

An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back.

Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars.

Change your avatar? 5 dollars.

Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars.

Ad free? 10 dollars.

Access to archives (posts over a certain number of years old) 10 dollars.

Not too expensive and no recurring costs for good citizens, prohibitively expensive for bots/trolls.

Also, on the forums, you can look at anyone's rap sheet and see exactly the post that they got banned (or probated or permabanned) for. Let's you know what sort of person you are dealing with.

I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same extension does that too. Archival access would be really interesting on something like Twitter where just about everything gets archived externally or screenshotted anyway.

But the minute any of these become recurring costs, even on the order of $1/mo, I'm out.

I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

There's a weird mess of consumers and incentives on the internet.

Users generally don't want to pay, so now they're the product. Just to get users products offer unsustainable free services and then die when they reach the breaking point or fail to get folk to pay. Users get upset when the products ask them to pay or revoke their free tier or just vanish ...

Wash rinse repeat.

I loved the idea, it got a lot of attention, but it didn't pick up enough users to get going.

Edit to add: App.net also had the problem of needing to justify $3m in funding. It "failed" because its model couldn't do that quick enough to make investors happy. A normal platform with slow but steady growth that depends on subscriptions doesn't have that problem as long as the bills are paid and enough people are happy with it to maintain growth. Mastodon proves it can be done, still running and growing a half decade after the entire SV media declared it dead because they didn't understand how self-funded platforms work. Others can learn from and build on it.

This is hilarious

EDIT: The way it ends up working on the forums is that if you do something to annoy someone that isn't against the rules, they can spend 10 bux and change your avatar to a photo of something that you don't want showing up on every post you make (and likely giant red text that says something like "Ask me about [something offensive]), and then you have to spend 5 bux to undo it.

It's hilarious to use and seems sustainable.

One-time fees are a perfectly fine model for a business, even if it is unfashionable currently.

> and there will always be new people using popular products.

If you succeed in being the go-to platform for every new generation you might be able to coast on that. But the last 20 years have shown that each generation gets its own new social network.

Twitter, Facebook, and Google have used ads to collect revenue from their users in the past. SaaS apps and services today use recurring subscriptions, which is nice because it lets you match up your inflows to your outflows. Old desktop software, which had high recurring costs too, used single payments (although they also charged for updates). Modern desktop software tends to use subscription fees.

Companies need to make their revenue models match what customers expect in order to get payment. That means that you should be selling your SaaS as a subscription or a metered API even if you (hypothetically) do not have recurring costs. It also means that Twitter might have to stay with a $0/month fee and collect its revenue in the form of ads and "direct payments for services."

For Twitter, "influencers" might pay as much as $1000 for a "verified influencer" label on their profile despite that many of them are upset at $20/month, particularly if you make it annoying for them (so they feel that they are actually spending their money on getting "verified" and the verification will be hard to fake). Maybe you can get $100/year as a "renewal fee" on those labels, too. If you offered the rest of us a $50 "not a bot" green checkmark that takes a few custom photos and an ID, you will probably get plenty of those too.

It's all psychology. Fixed fees and recurring fees can have the same NPV. The game is maximizing that NPV.

> Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off interest.

Ten dollars is surely much greater than the server costs for a single user for a month, or a year. That one-time cost may well be designed to be an endowment of sorts. Plus the avatar changing fees are probably, on average, not one-time fees.

it is substantially the Soviet Pravda.

Imre Lakatos defined totalitarianism in terms of "how distant in the past can I retrieve documents" - the shorter the span of accessible data, the worse. In historical totalitarianism regimes such obstacle was instated to hide possible ideological changes in the regime, to give an appearance of monolithic consistency. In general, if you have a collector and checking history is not a basic feature, than it is nothing but a joke.

(PS: the first post on HN is the 'Y combinator' submission from pg, Paul Graham, on October 9, 2006 - you find this with one URL. This is how it is supposed to be - the distantmost past is as accessible as the recentmost addition.)

This, of course, in the collector with the purpose I am imagining - the replying poster clearly wants to visit a very different place. In the restaurant you get "restored" through proper treatment, while at the bar the idea is to get disturbed through every device: restaurants shall not be bars.

When I, in the distant past, thought about checking T., it was because some specific great minds had approached it: I checked it on the idea to consult the statements from specific prestigious Intellectuals - not random posts.

And: the replying poster has not provided a speckle of a justification for the "bohemian" idea proposed.

> an audit trail of a government is very different

The platform that the submitter proposed for discussion reportedly has an extraordinary participation of leaders, ministers, politicians and official speakers. So, while my original statement was a parallel in an absiological context ("if something important was submitted it has to be retrievable"), even a direct more literal application of the idea is possible.

Within reason -- for example: pictures from college parties. There's no reason why these should be forever accessible. A nice, graceful decay on some data would make sense.

I would say a good example of "something stupid" would be to publish something that should remain private.

And by saying that, do not you get a vibe that makes you go "Wait a minute there...".

> different levels of data permanence

It makes more sense to discriminate "personal common spaces" and "The Public Statements of Sam Artist / of Noam Thinker / of Henry Statesman / of Theodor Ruler".

Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very fast.

That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few million user base (don’t remember the concurrent user numbers though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.

More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you’re gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS builds to the App Store.

I wrote a little about this after a particularly irritating experience with LinkedIn, but the same goes for twitter or any public forum.

https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

If you're on Twitter and you get targeted by, say, Ben Shapiro, the horde that comes at you isn't trivially filterable/blockable. There'll be thousands of them, and they're creative; just like spammers/phishers, they make a game out of evading mitigation measures.

At volume, this is a very tough problem to solve.

That's so easy that a Jr. Programmer of moderate talent could whip that up in a long weekend.

I could easily build my own just by iterating through the follower lists of prominent objectionable people to block them if Twitter didn't prevent it.

"It looks like you're using automation!"

No shit.

Because let's be serious. Apart from youtube comments, I don't think there's anything the scale of twitter for short messages at the moment. (and even that's much simpler problem)

Compare to Twitter where new people continuously query old messages with quickly changing replies, likes, retweet, mutes, blocks, etc to account for. But you don't want to materialise everyones timeline on every change either. However you likely do want to keep highly replicated snapshots of popular tags and popstars instead of processing actual events. And then you need some system that can query both and merge them into a usable personalised view.

Implementing search: just chuck the last hour of fire hose into s3 and update the ngrams.

Implementing real timeish view: ok, so we need to distribute+replicate the data so timeline queries can happen in parallel and get fresh info depending on subscriptions.

Implementing the number of likes ticking up as you watch the tweet: basically alien technology. (I assume it's optimised somehow because otherwise that would convert a single tweet view into 1 + however long someone stays on the page / 2s times the load in naive implementation)

discord, telegram?

Honestly, I'd probably just build Mastodon. I use it sporadically. My feed is exactly what I subscribed to, and nothing more. That of course doesn't make for an amazingly engaging platform that constantly pushes people to engage and to create new accounts, but that's precisely how I like things to be.

You probably won't get rich from catering to people like myself, though.

It's easy: Go to https://mastodon.online/auth/sign_up and sign up. Go to https://twitodon.com/ to try to automatically follow your Twitter friends on Mastodon. Then use the search bar to search for other of your friends. Click on their followers/following to look for other people to follow.

1. Micro-blogging doesn't add much in 2022. Velocity of content is too high and comment vs content is real. What would it have what Discord or Telegram can't provide? The content distribution to the world? Is that really a feature in 2022?

2. Followers are a terrible approximation of shared interest.

3. We use social media to be entertained and not to work. Ideally to connect with people that can help us move ahead. Stack overflow : Learn from smarter programmers. Finclout: Learn from smarter investors.

4. Do we really need a public global town square? Even if yes, there will always be boundaries based on spoken languages. (Chinese, English, Spanish, French, etc). How much does it help us that an Indian doctor can talk American politics to a South African? https://twitter.com/majornirmal/status/1587129879341867008

5. How is moderation baked into the product? People will exploit all your weaknesses to get ahead. For Finclout we implemented that as incentivized tasks for all users. How much do you allow for "edge" content. How does your system define "edge"?

6. Bots create engagement. Engagement creates DAUs. What's your strategy to use bots in your growth path? For finclout we don't. However, we have content partnerships in place so the app never feels empty.

7. What added value does decentralization bring? We partnered up with DeSo and ran a node for a while. Yet at this time, I think the only valuable innovation is decentralized identity management. Probably SBT will be the better solution here.

8. In 2023 we should go to a social sites because it provides us with the userbase to connect us with interesting people. I love Lunchclub for that exact reason. IMHO, this is how a social platform should be.

Mastodon still only has favourites. There's no way to say "I like this toot, but not enough to retwe... boost it" on Mastodon. Favouriting is more like "this is the best ever and I want to return to this later" -style bookmarking in my mind.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there are interesting technical challenges in a high volume site like Twitter. However, the problems and real existential challenges Twitter faces have nothing to do with tech.

I feel like people consistently underestimate the difficulty of creating a data backend for a social network.

It has to be readable and writable in real time, yet still performant enough for picky consumers. It needs to be able to handle text search. It needs to handle many-to-many relationships at scale (something that mainstream (NO)SQL databases struggle with). It needs a robust authentication layer, and probably a load of other things on top of this.

Building something like Twitter is still, in 2022, a really hard technical challenge.

Building something like Twitter is pretty simple.

Building something that scales to 400 million MAU is a really hard technical challenge.

If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33419574 by dustedcodes. Signed: mejutoco", then nobody could take this converstion away from you. It would be federated by all competing services that use this protocal.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

There's no way Jack doesn't know this already exists.

Honestly this project looks pretty interesting, and I hope it takes off. Want more decentralized tech without horrendous "defi" attached.

It's fully decentralized in that everyone runs their own instance, but with all open protocols (RSS), it would be trivial for someone to build a centralized/federated instance that can still interoperate. The open protocol which enables a decentralized model is the most important part of that decision.

With RSS as the protocol, you get interoperability with every blog ever for free. Combine private posting with public content and you get something really neat--the ability to have private conversations about public content all on the platform.

You also get an elegant solution to free-speech vs civility. No public content means no discovery so you'll never see anything from a source you didn't explicitly opt-in to. No trolls and no spam.

Arguably, this is more of a Facebook alternative than a Twitter alternative but I still think it is a very valuable approach to creating more civility in our broader society.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

It seems to me that most of what passes for discourse there is yelling at the “other side” and smug/snarky in-group posts.

The foundational act of a Twitter alternative is to create silos where communities are allowed to exclude other users. The platform is not a public "town square" — it never was — it's a private forum, where users may choose who they associate with.

So Reddit then.

Twitter right now is all noise and no signal. It's a bunch of people running through a crowded train station where everybody's shouting but nobody can hear more than a few words of what any single person is saying. How can that ever be a useful platform for civil discussion? It does make for a great broadcast platform. "The train from Chicago is leaving in half an hour. Mick wishes his mother a happy birthday."

There's lots of bare metal around

IMO, that's an absurd proposal completely detached from reality. I wholeheartedly care about what I write/post on any site. It's a trip down the memory lane. Even on Hacker News when I see what I posted in my earliest days, I feel proud of how much I have grow since then. I would be pretty pissed if I can't trust the fact that what I post won't be preserved.

The UX will be central to such a platform, and that's all we should be having a conversation about. I'd go as far as to say, that the central challenge of convoluted technical solutions like 'decentralized platforms' is to find a way to hide the backend away from the user. You want them to be none the wiser about what goes on behind their pretty website / app.

The problems with Twitter are not technical, they are baked into its design.

1. People are high-variance, and yet we're only allowed to follow individual accounts. That's a problem, especially because network effects mean that one person's voice gets amplified exponentially with the number of followers they have. Consider the six degrees of separation: applied to Twitter, we realize that it only takes 6 retweets to reach basically everyone. Following "Topics" is close but not good enough, because you cannot voluntarily opt into topics or really understand why a given tweet is within a topic; Twitter uses its Computer Magic to categorize tweets and makes all the decisions in a black box.

2. The only negative feedback is unfollowing. This is a problem because it means that practically all forms of engagement are treated equally. Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of comments, let's boost it so more people see it! Whoops, it was about space lasers. We are stuck repeatedly fighting Bad Takes because they have to be argued against every time they are brought up and always gain nonzero traction. They are never put to rest. There is very little negative incentive against being a garbage human on Twitter, especially if you're anonymous.

Edit: or maybe 7! - 1

When you combine three obvious truths:

* people are tribal to the point of irrationality

* controversial clickbait bullshit travels fast and right to page 1, erudite corrections go on page 7 and are cheerfully ignored (see point 1)

* people don't listen, they wait to talk

There is no value in giving everyone such a platform. It achieves no useful purpose whatsoever that cannot be achieved more neutrally, deliberately, and less sensationally.

On Bullshit is required reading.

The №1 issue to overcome in the latter is to achieve Twitter’s network effect fast, so the first goal would be to design for easy bridging, connecting or aggregating.

For the former, people open the page to see content they yearn for. That depends on their interests. If you only show content from their follows, there is too little; if you show content from the whole platform, their interest will be drowned in things they don’t care about.

One easy trick is to show messages from people you follow with high probability, and messages from people they follow with lower probability, and so on. But unfortunately, you eventually need a stronger recommendation algorithm, which can show viral tweets (like the “dress color” illusion from 2015) and suggest people that tweet about your interests. This is the main reason people come back to the app every day.

The replies feature is actively radioactive. I’d recommend only showing replies from people you’ve approved, and putting other replies in a separate menu without a notification counter.

On decentralization, unless you add a hefty seasoning of cryptography and replication, it does not make sense. Beyond fragmentation, the risk of servers going down or in malicious access to private information or forgery is better addressed in a centralized fashion. Trust is easily lost.

Besides, the tech becomes a no-brainer with a central system. Go for a relational database and index as things take steam. Start synchronous, then move to async batch jobs.

I might consider building something vaguely similar with a different featureset meant to fill a vaguely similar niche. A few half-formed thoughts about possible features for such a system:

- There is a hard limit on the number of users a given account may reply to, loosely inspired by Dunbar's Number. Let's say 50. This forces people to prioritize carefully who they want to interact with.

- Adding or removing someone to your reply list takes a day to take effect. This might reduce the degree to which flame wars can spread - by the time people have unlocked the ability to reply to something controversial, they'll have had a little time to cool down / have people generally lose interest.

- Limiting the number of tweets, retweets, and replies an account can make per day. I don't have any concrete numbers here, but the goal is to make people think more about what they actually want to reply to.

I'm not confident anything Twitter-like is actually a salvageable concept. These are some things I think might improve the odds of building something similar that isn't a toxic dumpster fire by nature.

I'd build a desktop only native application. You'll have to route ports down to your desktop to receive incoming connections, maintain a list of peer nodes in a text-file by hand.

It won't even support encryption, but you can always post base64 encoded pubkey encrypted stuff if you want to.

Everyone will be a content moderator, but nobody can really do anything but remove messages from their local storage (I don't know how moderation can even work with blawg chain technology, I'll have to keep this in mind when I write the toiletpaper).

There won't be algorithmic content federation though.. There will be a list of posts from everyone on the network, and there will be another list of posts from people you follow, and a third list of posts from people who follow you.

It will start off as a joke, but a few.. special people.. will see it as the answer to everything and it will become a booming success and make everyone, except myself, very wealthy.

It's going to be wonderful, I promise.