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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody will stop using twitter

In part because hosting providers like AWS collude to push viable competition offline.

No. Go throw up a twitter clone on an AWS instance or a digitalocean droplet, or host it on an old PC in your closet. Probably half of the people here on HN have coded some clone like that and it's just sitting unused.

It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up.

Also: things like gab, gettr, .win etc. all exist. They're just cesspools.

>It's not AWS preventing a twitter alternative from popping up.

Really? Cause I seem to recall that every company in their tech stack decided to drop Parler, including Amazon, and including removals from both app stores.

I'd like to see "half the people of HN" create a twitter clone - but don't forget ALL the infrastructure, no service providers, no app stores, no hosting, etc.

You recall correctly. It was an orchestrated deplatforming.

The person who created gab is a HN alum (although he was "kicked out")

A large part of the value of twitter is the userbase and reach of twitter. It's a network, and networks are natural monopolies, there's no collusion necessary to push out competition.

Now, if you were talking about something that uses the payments oligopoly (eg, Patreon clones), I'd be way more sympathetic to that. There, you can't even call it a conspiracy because they're operating in broad daylight. But for the social networks, it's all natural AFAICT.

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