HACKER Q&A
📣 afpx

Is there a market for an “Open” but non-free(beer) Twitter-like service?


You pay $5 to get unlimited posts (throttled to 1kb / sec). No ads. No selling of user data. Just a free and open API (for users) with a basic (fully-modifiable) web UI. No censorship (except for laws enforced by hosting country).

To make it possible, it'd have to be a MVP - just basic twitter functionality with all posts stored in memory and accessible for only a few days. Just basic, high-performance, low-latency micro-blogging with an extendable API. Everything else would be outsourced to the community: search, direct messaging, analytics, history, advanced functionality, etc.

It would be like a centralized mastodon, but with a b-corporation type structure.


  👤 armchairhacker Accepted Answer ✓
If it was popular I would join.

However it’s very hard to make a hit social media even when there is a market (see: decent dating apps), so i wouldn’t be optimistic.

That being said, it seems like a fun project, and if you use existing technologies you can probably make a prototype/MVP very quickly