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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see an alternative to Twitter that is as open as email is. eg: A microblogging system that is built on open standards in a distributed and federated way. Where no-one owns the platform and protocols.

In the beginning of the internet a bunch of open system emerged: Email, IRC, DNS, ... Nowadays it's mostly businesses that launch proprietary solutions to make $$$. What has changed since those early days?

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First, money showed up on the Internet. Second, if you don't stand to make a ton of it, you can keep using email, IRC, DNS... No need to launch something else.

Although it's not like new IRC daemons are not written, or new irc networks are not started. It's not dead, it's slowly evolving.

There are tons of open source alternatives based on standard protocols:

* https://jappix.com/ Jappix (XMPP)

* http://gnu.io/social/ GNU social (statusnet/pump)

* http://twister.net.co/ Twister (p2p microblogging)

* http://redmatrix.me/&JS=1 Red Matrix

The thing is: noone uses them.

There has been for years, it's called StatusNet (now GNU Social, apparently) and it's based on the open OStatus protocol. I had my own server federating with the reference instance (Laconi.ca), on which I followed a few users, like Tim Berners-Lee (who mostly cross-posted from Twitter).

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