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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust. There's no turning back now.

(side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on Google either.)

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Alex Payne: https://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. "

Yes! Thank you! Was starting to think I was crazy.

Is this it? It was the first hit on HN Search.

http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-...

That's an article about federation, but is that the Twitter employee who had internally pushed for them to become federated during their early days? I don't see any info about that in that post.

No idea....I just figured there might be some info on HN about it and decided to search there. Thought it at least might be a start on finding info on the subject :)

I don't know about Twitter itself, but I think there have been a few attempts at federate competitors or protocols. The most recent I can recall is Tent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)

It seems like Tent has morphed now into this: https://cupcake.io/

GNU Social is probably the most famous open twitter competitor and it uses ostatus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

Personal experience: While I have DuckDuckGo as the default search engine on my notebook, I end up taking multiple-word queries to Google most of the time because the results are much better there.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is only better for one-word queries for me because of its promoted results (e.g. when I'm searching for the name of an OSS project and it highlights the official website at the top of the results page).

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