Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon.

It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

> let Stephen Fry host his own server that he has to actively curate

I've barely had my coffee, and I've already seen the most "HN living in a bubble" comment of the day.

>> let people host their own instance

Totally. Why would anyone self-host when it could be written to a blockchain and be decentralized, tamperproof and censorship resistant? Twit-coin could reward influencers for their certified engagement metrics without knowing their underlying physical identity by maintaining value flows virtually. Brave browser is 80% there already.

I literally can’t tell if this is a joke. I’m going to treat it as earnest, because even if you’re trolling this is HN and every mention of cryptocurrency will get _someone_ nodding along in support.

Censorship resistance is only meaningful if there are actual people exchanging ideas and building community. Cryptocoin and 100% free speech is a perfect recipe to create an online space even more dominated by trolls, bots, and conspiracy theorists than Twitter is today.

Unfortunately, between Musk’s obvious enjoyment of manipulating markets however he can and Dorsey’s increasing focus on dWeb/Web3/“magic crypto sprinkles” I imagine they will run full speed towards more or less exactly the model you describe.

“Every tweet is an NFT now! Popular accounts charge Twitcoin to follow them! Advertisers can pay people Twitcoin to follow and retweet!” Etc. Etc.

> I literally can’t tell if this is a joke.

Ambiguity is a spice in life. I was thinking the name "twit-coin" would give the game away.

> actual people exchanging ideas

I enjoy exchanging ideas with ideas and with people. Anyone here may be an actual person or a biological process hosting a meme collection.

> conspiracy theorists

Are "conspiracy theorists" individuals who theorize about conspiracies or groups of people conspiring to promote a theory?

Thanks for bringing up the NFT. I had that in mind to add in but got distracted during composition. Imagine the possibilities of fractional ownership of 144 characters--it would open up a whole new world of ETFs.

Glad this blockchain/crypto thing did not exist over a decade ago. Otherwise we would never have something as cool as BitTorrent. There are so many people who neither understand decentralisation properly nor crypto but wanna somehow become part of conversation so they link the two and derail the conversation.

Amen.

But.. Bittorrent is actually about 20 years old. Maybe getting on for 25.

You forgot “Clients, of course, should be written only in Rust.”

Why on earth would Stephen Fry want to spend his time operating and moderating a social media site?

No he won't. Make it so easy that his PR could manage his own server instance. That is what originally use to happen when actors still had their own websites and forums.

Ok so he doesn't have to manage it himself, he could employ a team. Great, so how much is Stephen going to be paying to this team to moderate the content of his 12.4 million followers? A dozen people? A hundred maybe? It sounds like an expensive venture.

He could just use the tools that come with the service. Tools that could filter out words, phrases that he chooses to omit or he could choose to disable replies altogether. He can also choose who gets to follow him based on certain parameters. I'm pretty sure if better minds than mine chose to solve this problem, they can.

BTW the site you are currently on has two moderators.

Why do any of those things require a "federated Twitter"?

Hackernews has two moderators and several orders of magnitude fewer users. I would argue that the amount of moderation required increases exponentially with the number of eyeballs.

Ok, so once users discover 1990s leetspeak what happens then?

Better mind than yours have chosen to solve this problem, they work at facebook and twitter and it's been a disaster! Twitter has been impotent, and facebook have been a public danger. The hard truth of it is that HN just isn't a scalable solution. It ropes in users to self-moderate which results in some really unehealthy issues at scale.

So... a blog?

Ok so if you change Twitter entirely to some other thing that others have tried and failed at numerous times then you will....have it both ways? Wat?

> Not if you make Twitter federated and let people host their own instance. For example, let Stephen Fry host his own Twitter server and he will choose what is allowed and what is not. This Twitter will integrate with other Twitter servers over ActivityPub. Something like Mastodon.

Moderation is hard work, and making users do their own moderation themselves defeats the purpose from a user perspective (e.g. exposing Fry to toxic comments so he can theoretically moderate them away himself on his own instance is not practically different that giving him an unmoderated platform).

> It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

Musk isn't going to figure out anything. If anyone does, it will be someone working for him and he'll get all the credit.

Doing this would have zero impact on the bedrock fact that content moderation is difficult.

You can't wave that away with a wand and an incantation.

So fracture the community into a bunch of moderated instances with varying rules?.... Sounds like reddit

Wil Wheaton had a disastrous experience with Mastodon, much worse than he had with Twitter. He's been made fun of on every Internet platform for 30+ years, and found Mastodon unusable, apparently

Even if Fry could run his own instance, how the heck is he going to write his own moderation code?

Next week on "command line" with Stephen fry

I think user content moderation should be enforced. If I do not want to see tweets that contain certain words or phrases, block it. Treat abuse like spam. Block, isolate, and it will go away.

If I only want tweets that contain the words “Zaphod Beeblebrox” then that’s all I want to see, and should have that ability.

> If I do not want to see tweets that contain certain words or phrases, block it.

You can already mute words on Twitter.