Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Launching a big brand Twitter alternative on top of the existing Fediverse feels to me like it could work incredibly well right now.

The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.

Now imagine Tumblr ships ActivityPub. Every Tumblr user can now follow any Mastodon user, and vice-versa. The Tumblr ecosystem gets a whole bunch of new high quality available content. Mastodon enthusiasts can tell their skeptical friends "go sign up for a Tumblr account and follow me from that".

Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?

View on HN

> Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?

I'd rather build something new and actually have a userbase than be something akin to a subreddit with fleeting users. It will be a lot more hard work, but it's worth it.

Also, Mastodon sucks. This whole "let's be free together" but also "don't step out of line" culture is disgusting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086.

> The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.

That's the problem. It's unnecessarily complex and other than a subniche, people in the real world are not interested in it. They just don't care about this at all.

Which is the opportunity. It's unnecessarily complex: so solve that.

It's possible that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what's the point of the 'fediverse' is. Looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an overcorrection to the trend from the 2010s to move everything to silos (independent forums -> facebook groups / subreddits / twitter).

Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

>Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?

That's... kind of the point of the fediverse? A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible. Identity is controlled by the end user.

But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".

It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.

Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.

> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible

I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho

Reply on news.ycombinator.com