Where Are the Twitter Clones?

Question

Back in the day clones would shoot up as soon as someone got into trouble, usually even leveraging a pre-existing open source code base.I'm surprised I haven't seen anything like that yet following the current Twitter fiasco. Mastodon is a vastly different prospect - where are the Twitter clones that people expect at a time like this?

smoldesu · Accepted Answer

Why would you use a Twitter clone? If you object to the idea of someone buying a platform you like, you probably shouldn't move to a platform with the same problems.

awb · Answer

If by &ldquo;back in the day&rdquo; you mean 10-15 years ago, then Internet and social media adoption was a small fraction of what it is today.Today, you can&rsquo;t handle (or attract) a large percentage of Twitter users without tons of financing (to handle server costs until ad revenues kick up) and lots of paid or viral advertising.The 1st 80% of the functionality is super easy and open source, it&rsquo;s the last 20% of handling advertising, content moderation, content algorithms, etc. that&rsquo;s more complex.

jurassic · Answer

There are no good Twitter clones because, despite all the memes about "I could build that in a weekend", reproducing Twitter would be a very significant undertaking. And even if you managed to make a good knock-off, there's no clear path to profit.