Let’s replace Twitter with something much better

My vision for the perfect social networking platform

@ProfBrianCox recently wrote a post describing his ideas for the new social networking platform. This post has reached the front page of HN, and many people have showed interest. So I have decided that it’s time for me to share my vision for such platform:

Hacker Tribe

(It’s still work in progress, launching soon)

My goal is to take the best ideas and experience from all the social networks that have been developed up to this point, and create the ultimate social media platform, that will work the way social networks were supposed to work, if they were designed now — it will be open source, decentralized, elegant, simple, with high quality community and without any nonsense.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

• Discovery system 1 is based on upvotes, like reddit.
• Discovery system 2 is based on reposts, and works like twitter.
• Subscription functionality works like RSS. You can follow people and see their posts in a reverse-chronilogical order on your front page.
• Publishing tools work like on Medium — beautiful editor, tags, publications.
• This platform is open source and decentralized. Anyone can easily export their data and spin up their own instance, which will be automatically plugged into the network(that functions like GNU Social).
• It has an API that enables developers to do everything they wanted to do with twitter API.
• The community instance that I’m going to launch will have strict moderation, like Hacker News, that will optimize for the quality of the discussion. But anyone can launch their own instance, and that will enable the absolute freedom of speech.
• I am going to monetize it by offering easy and effortless hosting, the way Discourse does. That will take care of the development and server costs, while keeping the platform ad-free.

I think this sort of system would be perfect, and the only thing required to build it was the right decentralization protocol, which has appeared recently — ActivityPub.

At the moment I have implemented all the functionality aside from the most challenging part — decentralization with AvtivityPub, which I am still figuring out.

If you are interested in testing out this platform and would like to give me some feedback and shape it’s development — send me a message(raymestalez@gmail.com), and I will invite you to the beta version.

If you would like to contribute to it’s development — you can find the code over here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/nexus

(I am currently cleaning up the backend code, and rewriting the frontend in React).

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