@wakest I've been around the net for 20 years and never heard of it. I've had an old identica account even way way back.

the net is big and lots of niches exist I guess. :-)

@pnathan have you heard of cupcake.is? or Patchwork?

@wakest no and no. The idea of a Better Twitter has been around for a while. Cupcakes are tasty and I should find one soon.

Anyway....

$ curl --insecure -L cupcake.is
curl: (35) error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure

well THATS interesting.

and Patchwork looks super rough-

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ssb-patchwork

the big thing that makes one of these sites go is a critical mass of people, along with software juuust good enough to do the trick

@wakest You can also identify the ones that will definitely explode messily by the OMG WE'RE GONNA CHAAANGE THEEE WORRRLD rhetoric backed by zero experience and boundless plans (*cough* diaspora). Mastodon is, in certain very key aspects, not technologically trying to Be Everything. It's written in a very boring way in a very well known stack, doing essentially a very well stomped space. That's part of why its working.

@pnathan @wakest All those world-changers so often have serious scope creep issue. Figure out what you want, then do it and do it well.

Mastodon seems to have nailed down it's niche and seems to be working hard at servicing it well.

@pnathan the beta of patchwork is actually super impressive and surprisingly not that rough. I would recommend anyone interested in this sort of stuff spend a few hours playing around with it. I was actually blown away once I got it installed.

@pnathan https://boingboing.net/2017/04/07/bug-in-tech-for-antipreppers.html

@wakest scuttlebutt looks interesting. seems like something the rainbow family and similar Traveler folks might prefer.

I don't know that it's my bag, I'm a little more householder, but it's interesting stuff.