Comment by quaintdev
17 hours ago
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.
17 hours ago
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 and Twitter had an API and that they encouraged people to actually use them?)
RSS everywhere, websites with honest to god Bittorrent links. Software you could download and own without a subscription. Forums, Geocities, personal websites, IRC (no Discord ads, server caps, rules against scripting), RPG Maker 2000.
Google and Facebook and Twitter fucked us. The 2010's - 2020's were cellphone incrementalism and walled garden overgrowth.
Hell, even Flash was awesome pre-Adobe. It was buggy, full of zero day vulns, and was inefficient for mobile, but children as young as 8 could build games and animations -- and they were! We got left with a pile of "standards" CSS, Javascript transpilers, competing standards, nodegrunts, and library churn and it was never the same.
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 seem to be the seeds of big tech's undoing. We can totally overrun them now.
AI = actually a threat to big tech, not a moat. They're going to kill themselves with their own product.
We'll probably build distributed protocols that can finally get the product and UX love that compel people to start using them.
And it feels so awesome to just build things I love - games on the weekend, custom audio players, file organizers, SRS software. I'm loving software again for the first time in a long time. Robotics...
> Google and Facebook fucked up the internet.
I'd say advertising has fucked up the Internet. Everything they (and plenty of others) have done has been to collect and sell personal data to advertising brokers.
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That Google failed to turn Google Reader into a giant open blogging social network and instead created G+ is something we will still be wondering after Google itself has stopped existing.
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And YouTube encouraged people not to use their real name.
While I remain anxious about the dystopian future AI may ultimately deliver to us, this has been a clear silver lining in my eyes.
I have an old Wyze Scale that restricts advanced features behind a proprietary mega-app, forcing users to swipe past their other services. I've now been able to reverse engineer their Bluetooth protocol which can be used with tools like OpenScale.
In an older world, this would have been a prolonged endeavor for juice that ultimately isn't worth the squeeze. Now it can now takes place in an afternoon.
We stopped having APIs because of Cambridge Analytica.
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I really want them both atomised. Not sold for parts. Not reconstituted into smaller monopolies. Not state owned. Just like, delete both businesses and push their physical assets into a dry lakebed and blow them up.
And then remove all copyright law and patents pertaining to software. So the subsequent players are forced to play nice with everyone.
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.
I think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.
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.
> What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at
This is some sort of absolute, fundamental difference between the early web and now, at least how I experienced it as a teen in the late 90s in Hungary. Back then I made a site, because you wanted to make something of my own, in my style, as I wanted. There was nobody else online from my friends, and I made new friends online. I actually found my age people on ICQ, within the same subculture.
This "oh my friends are there" approach is what destroys everything. More precisely the people who can't decide for themselves.
That's kind of the same thing though - the people you wanted to interact with were there. They just were a different cohort than what you might find on something like Instagram today.
Then do you think that the average person's disinterest in moving to different platforms is a bad thing? How does this affect the ideal version of the web it seems like you're advocating for?
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What would an average person lose if everybody used more open platforms?
What is the average person losing now on closed platforms?
Think about why they should care about your answer and if there's any proof that it bothers them to the degree that they may view your alternative platforms as actual solutions.
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.
atrpoto is great technology but disappointing communities
most people in bluesky moved to bluesky driven by hate and fear instead of love and curiosity
i notice they talk bad a lot about other people's posts in other platforms
Echo chamber strikes again, because I see none of that, just love for knowledge, history, and science.
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Adversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.
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.
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Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
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.
On one hand yeah, but on the other hand clubhouse was pretty cringe
Threads as well
in the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like
the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive
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!
This is more or less the approach that the EU is taking with the DMA. As with most EU regulatory projects, it proceeds, ah, _slowly_ (Twitter isn't yet subject to it, for instance, apparently largely because historically it didn't have a high enough market cap, though the new entity where it's been tacked onto a rocket launch company and a racist LLM presumably now qualifies...)
This is the correct approach. If these American companies want to operate in our countries, and maintain their positions as our primary information channels, then they need to obey laws.
We need open APIs, transparent algorithms, and above all, accountability.
The average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.
The platform is the people, not the tech.
The network is the people, the platform is the tech. Which do you need?
If you're engaging in discussions you need the network. If you're reading municipal weather warnings you don't really, it's just a data source that can be copied anywhere.
Probably where twitter is going honestly. Not unlike MySpace pivot to music and Facebook being used exclusively for Messenger
Likely the most astute observation in all 150+ comments.
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!
Not sure about hackers but the lack of search is a killer for anyone normal. Also, threads or rather the lack thereof in Mastodon is not great either.
If no normie can use them, what's the point?
Mass social networks are influencer territory.
You do want the reach —otherwise you'd just make a group on Session with your friends or whatever.
The centralized platforms are a dictatorship of sorts but they make the often insufficient effort to include groups that hate each other.
If a Mastodon instance can become that centralized platform, I'll be the first to sign up.
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.
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I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?
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.
>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other
it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.
So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.
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/
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
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.
A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.
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.
What is Digg or Myspace
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.
The first step is to actually make a better platform.
The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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.
Ah that makes sense. I didn’t realize Sieg Heil was German for “my heart goes out to you”
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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.
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I think it’s just literally anyone who sees your post and also has eyes.
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There are pictures, dude. What is wrong with you?
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if there's repeated statements and gestures to that effect on national TV and other mass publications, it's beyond "echo chamber" status...
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What’s a super Nazi?
It is a fact that Musk is a Nazi. If someone publicly gives a Nazi salute and publicly endorses trash like the great replacement theory, I’m going to call them a Nazi, because that’s what they are.
If other CEOs say similar stuff in private, that’s really sad. If they ever say it publicly, I’ll call them Nazis as well.
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.
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The "free speech" on X made it so that I had to self-censor, though. Any post about wanting cycle infrastructure in my city was met with death threats and abuse from right wing bluecheckmarked lunatics. Is that really what free speech is about?
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.
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