[boplicity]

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.

[TheRealPomax]

Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to users on a centralised platform is that their potential reach is that entire platform's user base. The exact same is true for any other platform, but the numbers differ by orders of magnitude, and as we all know: bigger number must be better.

[the-printer]

This is not a refutation because I think that you’ve given a nice response to the topic. But I think that the people who are concerned or interested with reaching “everyone” deserve being beholden to the Big Box platforms of today; whichever ones rise and gain steam in the future that use phrases like “foster dialogue and bring people together” in lieu of “drive engagement and bring in ad dollars” then crash and burn under the weight of internal whistleblowers and damning The Guardian exposés.

I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”

[pjc50]

"quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.

[horsawlarway]

It might feel that way, but I promise you it's definitely not "everyone".

Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not).

So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you.

Is that larger than you're going to get on your own site? Probably.

Is that everyone? fuck no. It's basically no one. You're reaching the worst 5% of the country - those who have nothing better to do than browse twitter, or those who are using twitter to promote themselves.

[lelag]

Tweets often do reach much further than active users of the Twitter platform as they are often embedded in mainstream news stories and such.

[horsawlarway]

Sure - but that's true of every site on the web. Conflating mainstream media's reach with Twitter's is fairly disingenuous, since mainstream media also highlights basically every other platform in similar ways.

The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.

[yunwal]

Definitely not true of every site on the web. I tried searching for mentions of hackernews (a relatively large forum, and also vc backed, not independent) on the nytimes website. One result https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/magazine/the-3-10-13-issu...

Most media sources aren't embedded in small forums.

[horsawlarway]

I see roughly 400... https://imgur.com/a/QirnOG5

Admittedly - it's fairly certain that some of those will be about ycombinator itself - but I don't really find that outside the scope of the ask - given that many of the hits for twitter are really just following the company drama and not expanding the reach of a single user's tweet.

[kibwen]

Which, if they can be spread outside of Twitter, refutes the earlier point that "influence stops at the water". The web is the platform.

[darkwater]

Mmmh everyone that I follow or Twitter thinks I should read. I follow Musk on Twitter and I don't see any of his shitposting, or I don't see many celebs or journalists tweets either. Am I not one of the everyones?

[twobitshifter]

Why should people populate your island when the smart thing to do is make their own?

[babypuncher]

That is exponentially more difficult.