Ask HN: If you were to build an alternative Twitter

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • hnrss

    Custom, realtime RSS feeds for Hacker News

  • >RSS - People put out RSS feeds. People subscribe to RSS feeds.

    RSS might replace Twitter for your particular use case. However, it doesn't replace Twitter in general case for the public because RSS is one-directional.

    The phenomenon of the "Twittersphere" includes bi-directional activity like replies and retweets.

    As an analogy, this Hacker News site has users taking part in reading and writing activities. A few users like to spread the word that they consume HN via RSS just fine (e.g. maybe get feeds from https://hnrss.github.io/).

    But users (who are not just pure lurkers) can't use RSS to upvote/downvote comments or post their own replies. Therefore, RSS can't replace HN's website for general usage.

    Likewise, RSS can be a way of consuming NYTimes newspaper, but RSS can't replace the NYTimes itself.

    RSS is an undeniable convenience for readers but its limited scope does not provide viral mechanics and feedback loops for writers publishers.

    RSS works at the abstraction level of "protocol for data download". Sites like Twitter and HN, etc work at abstraction level of "virtual marketplace of ideas" -- and that function is out of scope for RSS.

  • deserve

    Own Your Data ยท Control The Code

  • Is there a business model? Absolutely, you just have to not want to be the techno-imperator of the network graph and not want to become a trillionaire from building social services.

    Disclaimer: I am building such a "social technology" around domain names, letting users truly own the database of their interaction with a service, https://github.com/plurid/deserve

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    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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