Twitter bought Loren Brichter's Tweetie and bastardized it into oblivion. I hate their first party app so much. After they ruined Tweetie I've been with Tweetbot and have purchased every update because it's worth every cent. That being said, Twitter isn't what it used to be. It's a dying platform mostly filled with hate and trolls. I mainly use it as a glorified RSS feed and post a lot less than I used to. I'd still rather use it than FaceBook, which I left back in 2010, but I really wish that there was a viable alternative that isn't for tweens.
I have half a mind to build a social network using the open source WordPress API. I have experience building what is basically a small-scale form of Twitter that runs on WordPress, which integrates with a custom app for researchers. Unfortunately the funding for that project was killed when it was nearly done due to external forces. While this idea could de-centralize a social network and give more control to users, it would also require more technical skill to basically setup a WordPress site for each person who wants their own account to hook into the platform. But users could own their own content and the app could just hook into each registered user's API. There wouldn't be much cost except maintenance of the client app which connects to each site, but it seems like a nightmare to build something to handle and possibly short-term cache all of those requests. Then you have to deal with error handling. Does it just not show someone in your feed if their WP site is having trouble? And the only reason I picked WP is because it's pretty flexible with hit's API, open source, and very popular online. Oh, and I also have a lot of experience with it. But it's also not ever going to become a huge thing because people would have to pay anywhere from $5-10/mo for shared hosting.
It probably just makes more sense to build something and charge people $5-10/mo to use it. But will people actually buy into that? Personally, I know a lot of people who would, but they're the type of people who value privacy more than average and aren't poor. It's not until people are really, truly, deeply hurt by privacy violations that I think the tide will turn and they'll start spending money on a social network that isn't trying to monetize their data.
I have half a mind to build a social network using the open source WordPress API. I have experience building what is basically a small-scale form of Twitter that runs on WordPress, which integrates with a custom app for researchers. Unfortunately the funding for that project was killed when it was nearly done due to external forces. While this idea could de-centralize a social network and give more control to users, it would also require more technical skill to basically setup a WordPress site for each person who wants their own account to hook into the platform. But users could own their own content and the app could just hook into each registered user's API. There wouldn't be much cost except maintenance of the client app which connects to each site, but it seems like a nightmare to build something to handle and possibly short-term cache all of those requests. Then you have to deal with error handling. Does it just not show someone in your feed if their WP site is having trouble? And the only reason I picked WP is because it's pretty flexible with hit's API, open source, and very popular online. Oh, and I also have a lot of experience with it. But it's also not ever going to become a huge thing because people would have to pay anywhere from $5-10/mo for shared hosting.
It probably just makes more sense to build something and charge people $5-10/mo to use it. But will people actually buy into that? Personally, I know a lot of people who would, but they're the type of people who value privacy more than average and aren't poor. It's not until people are really, truly, deeply hurt by privacy violations that I think the tide will turn and they'll start spending money on a social network that isn't trying to monetize their data.
