Anyone remember back in the day when every platform had RSS feeds, and you could aggregate your Facebook and Twitter on sites like FriendFeed? “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”

What are incentives for the average person? Their logic seems straightforward: they want to be where their friends are at. And all they want to do there is cycle through their base emotions at a whim's pace.

Whatever politics or technologies that make alternative platforms "better" to some people doesn't matter to most. The idea that new platforms should even have the "millions" (read: the masses) in mind comes across as being antithetical to the trend toward decentralized tech.

atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.

Adversarial interoperability works well for this. Facebook did it in its early days — it let you connect your account on then-popular competing social media website (MySpace, probably, I don't remember for sure) and would import your social graph and crosspost on your behalf.

That’s why I think atproto is cool. It’s the only thing I’m aware of that provides for actually forking a public social network.

Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.

In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.

Only through regulations mandating interoperability and enforced at national level. This is social problem, not technological one. So technology won't solve it

Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days

in the current climate the definition of "better" might not be one you like

the "better" that will win will be what's more engaging and addictive

The average person, on either end of political or cultural spectrum, or anywhere on anything for that matter, is fine with wherever they are. Also, the last thing they want is an overtly opinionated and often increasingly hostile population on alternative platforms and apps, sometimes actually moderated by, spearheaded by, benevolent admin overlords. They are less worried about migrating their data, or preserve it, than the hn crowd, criting cron jobs and backup and migration scripts, whenever the need comes. That’s why they won’t migrate, they will just start using the next service and then the next and next. Until then they are not interested and it shows. Serves right for the economic and governance models we as a collective society chose — it applied in everything, there’s no picking. Not that this is how it should be or should not be, but this is how it is.

The platform is the people, not the tech.

There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".

But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".

I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.

I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go.

Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.

>Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other

it's been solved, ban the platform. This is a collective action problem. Even if every single user on platform X wants to move to platform Y, as long as they can't coordinate the movement individual cost exceeds the benefit they'd all get.

So the most straight forward way is to get rid of the platform , and everyone will move out of necessity.

We could mandate that any platform beyond a certain (huge) size must provide open interoperability APIs.

Less radically, we can demand that any entity that takes any public money (and of course public entities themselves) avoid communicating solely through closed platforms.

It's insane that the primary public communication channel for e.g. certain UK government institutions and the Norwegian police, was Twitter at one point!

All you need is to mandate real-time API access for users... Unfortunately even the EU doesn't seem prepared to do that though.

I suppose if we could standardize on some kind of federation protocol and have locally-stored (and synced between devices) identities we could use for accounts everywhere, that would solve a lot of problems, but I don't see it happening.

And in the context of twitter-style platforms, federation to me has always seemed like a "which wind would you like to piss into?" situation where you have no idea what servers/people can even see what you're posting, especially when many (even large) servers not only share centralized error-prone block/ban lists but also keep defederating from each other.

A common pattern I see is to build a competitor to a platform people are outraged at and then completely fumble the step of acquiring the hate site's userbase by gating your new one behind an invite only system for months.

We have better platforms, most people are just too passive to switch. The masses should stay where they are so as not to invade and pollute the newer and better communities with the same problems that inevitably come with high scale.

What is Digg or Myspace

Yes - that is indeed a problem.

The billionaires make using their products quite simple. It was easy to sign up for twitter back when it was still usable. Even before Elon took over, it basically died.

The first step is to actually make a better platform.

The problem with all the decentralized alternatives is that they sacrifice usability for decentralization and then almost nobody cares about decentralization so for most people it's only downsides.

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You're not going to get many volunteers to move from a free-speech platform to a censored one. Everyone who wants the censorship is already on BlueSky or Mastodon. Part of sharing a society with people is being okay with their being able to say things you don't like.

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