[1as]

I backed this almost immediately, and expected them to be a lot closer to the goal than they are now (still more than $300,000 off with only seven days to go). I'm very surprised with the apparent lack of resonance with the idea from people around here.

So what are some of the reasons you aren't backing?

[smacktoward]

The problem with App.net (as it's currently described, anyway) is that it's halfway between what people who love Twitter want and what people who hate Twitter want, which makes it less than an obvious sale for both.

People who love Twitter want... Twitter. App.net doesn't interoperate with Twitter; it's another, separate silo. There's no guarantees that your Twitter friends will move to App.net with you, which limits the appeal if you live in Twitter.

People who hate Twitter hate it for a variety of reasons. App.net doesn't address most of these. If you hate Twitter because they kneecapped their developers, guess what, there's no guarantees App.net won't kneecap their developers five years from now either. If you hate Twitter because it's a centralized, proprietary system, guess what, App.net is centralized and proprietary too. If you hate Twitter because of its scaling problems, guess what, there's no guarantees that App.net (which, as noted, is as centralized as Twitter is) will be any better at dealing with that stuff. And so forth.

Personally, I fall into the latter category; I have lots of problems with Twitter. But nothing about App.net screams to me that here is the solution to those problems. Instead it just feels like Twitter with a different owner and a subscription fee -- which are just about the only ways at this point you could take the idea of Twitter and make it less appealing to me.

[jonmwords]

The guarantee that App.net won't kneecap its developers is that its developers are paying customers.

[streptomycin]

If a service doesn't kneecap its developers, yet those developers have no userbase because nobody uses the service, does it make a sound?

[k-mcgrady]

I'm not backing it because there isn't a real need for it. It would be nice to use a twitter like service ad-free as a customer and not as a product but whenever you charge for a service like this attracting people to it is very difficult. A lot of people I know love and user twitter. None of them would pay for this. So, why would I pay for this if none of the people I care about are using it?

To me it seems like Twitter pissed this guy off so he decided to try and build a competitor. It's a nice idea (and something us geeks can get behind) but if he did any market research I bet he would have discovered very quickly it's a lost cause. The vast majority of people aren't going to pay for a product they can get for free and people are the most important aspect of a social network. Without people it's doomed to failure.

[Permit]

The ads I get on twitter and Facebook are not a dealbreaker for me. I dont understand how its an improvement over either service with the exception that there are no ads and will likely protect my data better. (Thats another issue im not particularly worried about).

[marquis]

I either don't have time to understand, or it hasn't been made clear to me what it is and how it's going to save my life/money/family time.

[debacle]

My justification, from just a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4330336

[natarius]

To me the app.net approach is no taking it far enough!

I would absolutely back a p2p twitter like service and also pay for the "official" client and it's updates.

But just another corporate owned service...naaa