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Comment by MicropenisMike | Hacker News Reader

Because the alternative is Twitter.

The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.

Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.

I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor.

I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point.

I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.

Mastodon don't even have a proper search.

Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.

Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.

5th time's a charm.

Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.

You can also just not use either.

Hacker News is a fine alternative

HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.

At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.

What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?

Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Free flow of information, huh?

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