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Decentralized Twitter


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2020 Aug 10, 10:28pm   439 views  5 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

Given that Tweets are so small, and Twitter so obnoxious about banning truth-tellers, it seems both feasible and useful to come up with a way to decentralize Twitter.

How long are Tweets again? 280 chars

How much data can be put in the .txt field of a DNS record? I think it's 255 chars

Maybe instead of having a Twitter account, people should just update their DNS records, and let them get propagated around the world automatically.

You could read them on the command line with "dig patrick.net txt" or similar (though I'm using that space myself for a technical purpose at the moment).

Web sites would spring up to cache the txt records of famous people, because that would mean free traffic, therefore ad money.

This came to me after trying to view Katie Hopkins Twitter account and finding she has been banned: https://twitter.com/KTHopkins

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1   tanked   2020 Aug 11, 6:53am  

The problem is, often tweets are in multiple parts to get around the 280 char limit. There would be no way to post more than 1 tweet at once.

Anyone who has a DNS, can have a web site and can then have a blog. Twitter is a "blog-to-go" site, if one gets banned they can go back to normal blogs.

I think you aren't seeing the forest for the trees :)
2   Minime   2020 Aug 11, 6:55am  

I think blockchain can be perfect replacement of Twiter. Its decentralized and can easily support 280 chars data load.
3   Patrick   2020 Aug 11, 8:42am  

What does Twitter offer exactly that blogs do not?

Is it just the standardized format of every Twitter account?

Or the fact that they have their own "DNS" in the sense that you can message people with @ and index topics with #, and that those symbols do not work across websites?

Maybe those are what need to be replaced.

Perhaps all websites could make @joe on their site be an email or site notification to patrick.net/user/joe as a standard for sending a public message to a user named joe on patrick.net, and analogously for every other site. It's guaranteed to be globally unique. Not sure what to do about spam though. That's one advantage Twitter has.

And to see all the recent entries on a particular topic, all blogs could make a "#topic" mention auto-link to the most recent day's worth of that topic on DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=topic&df=d&ia=web They seem to be the most honest search engine.

But then, if they haven't indexed all those things yet, you wouldn't see them. Another problem.
4   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2020 Aug 11, 9:20am  

Stopped using twitter while ago. Just no benefit to it. It’s just people arguing dumb shit all day long. And lots of homo agitators.
5   Patrick   2020 Aug 11, 5:14pm  

Scott Adams is very good, and still not banned:

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays

I wish he would post all that elsewhere.

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