I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population.
Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it.
Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon. There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not necessarily a business model).
I agree that the thing preventing people for years from making their own Twitter Clone was never the technical hurdle of replicating twitter's microblogging platform, but the network effect that Twitter had. Twitter at its source is a simple CRUD system. Yes it encounters exciting complications at scale to manage that amount of data, but its still a CRUD application.
However, if there ever were a time when the network effect could shift enough to "cross the chasm" to public adoption, it is now (and quite literally TODAY).
People are looking for an alternative. Mastadon is the closest to achieving it. There are plenty of things I don't like about Mastadon, but unfortunately I think thats what we have. I do believe that the time is right for a clone to exist and actually gain significant adoption. As more and more prominent "influencers" (i hate that term, but its the reality) move off of Twitter and onto Mastadon, the masses will move where the influencers are. Remember that something like 95% of social media users are "lurkers". They don't create content, they only consume it. So they will move to where the creators are and if their creators are on Mastadon, then the masses will move over there.
Note: "Crossing the Chasm" is a marketing term that refers to the inflection point where early adopters and mass minority have joined a platform, and then majority mass follows. For example, when your parents started joining Facebook, that was Facebook "crossing the chasm".
Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter user).
The top 20 or 100 would be pretty irrelevant to most Twitter users I would think. Not sure I followed any of them personally. Twitter is a patchwork of communities, many if which don’t really overlap. Which is why it can lose users to Mastodon bit by bit, rather than just collapsing.
> why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet.
They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team.
Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
> Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
They also did this. When you need to migrate all your tweets and connections over, suddenly your really thankful Mastodon was quietly-decentralized underneath, and makes doing this mostly just a two-click operation.
> But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
That wasn't the case at least for me.
I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as of today) and I was told to find a server.
I guess most people would give up at that point, though I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page. It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set. I could build my kingdom, but of course I won't, since I wasn't interested in the decentralized bit anyway.
tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
> It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set.
Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.
"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"
> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).
It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.
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I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.
But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.
> Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
The vast majority of people have their primary address in one of the following ways:
1) Their ISP gave them an email when they signed up (with handhold support)
2) Their work gave them an email when they started (with handhold support)
3) They asked a tech savvy friend who told them to use GMail instead of 1 or 2 (with some support from said tech friend)
4) They signed up for a hotmail account 20 years ago and are still using the same password
You can't just handwave away that picking a server is _hard_ for non tech people, as they don't understand the significance of their choice. Twitter for comparison, is one site with a big "sign up here" button.
The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire network to move over at once. You're right that most people don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where you join the server that best aligns best with your interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though, so not sure on what will win out.
I don't think anyone has launched it because they can see how much difficulty Twitter had turning a profit. There are a number of companies that could launch such a thing (especially now that hiring former-Twitter employees should be as easy as it will ever be), but they also have financial teams capable of modeling whether or not it would be profitable.
The 80% twitter clone that's "not an advanced concept" is fully eclipsed by Mastodon. You're free to host a Mastodon server that federates with no one, and there's your clone. The problem is the remaining 20%, which Mastodon has covered some of, but certainly wouldn't be done "quickly".
They have. Hive, Post News, Cohost, etc. But most people don't care about whether a system is centralised or decentralised, so Mastodon seems to be doing best stats wise.
Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.