Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Is This The Moment For Twitter Alternatives With @gabor and @BigTechnology

Episode Date: December 17, 2022

Emergency bonus episode! Is this the moment for Twitter alternatives? T2.social is one of them and the founder of that project, @gabor, joins us to kick it all around. So does our friend Alex Kantrowitz from @BigTechnology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. everybody, Brian here. So it turns out I lied to you twice this week. I lied first when I said we were not going to do any more Twitter-Elon stories. But then I also lied when I said there would be no bonus episode this weekend. There is a bonus episode. This is it. It came about because

Chris Messina got in touch with Gabor Shelley, the founder of T2.com, which is one of the, I don't know, family of Twitter clone slash Twitter alternatives that is popping up. Gabor graciously agreed to talk to us early on a Saturday morning so that we could do this. We also got Alex Cantorwitz, who's in Germany right now to jump on as well. Alex, you'll remember, is our friend from the Big Technology podcast. Basically, what we kick around here is, specifically what is the T2 project? What are they aiming to do? And also, just generally, in this moment, is this the moment where a Twitter competitor

could flourish, could catch fire, as it were. We kick all that stuff around. Thanks to everybody for answering the bat signal for this emergency episode. And enjoy. Welcome everybody to the TechMean ride home experience. This is a special emergency podcast edition. There is so much shit going on on Twitter that we could not talk about it. And I've had my mind kind of worked by a lot of things that have been happening recently.

And for the first time in my 16 years on Twitter, I decided to meet my profile or my account private. It's just, I needed a little bit of like a mental health break. I needed to step away from it. I was spending far too much time watching every move and turn. And Brian, of course, in the show also talked about how, you know, he's had his own sort of, you know, crisis in this moment, like not wanting to cover every moment, and yet it's such a big story.

And so one, this might be a little bit of a therapy session, but also two, we have the opportunity to talk to some folks who know a lot about these things, and in fact, we're super stoked to welcome Gabor Chelle, who's actually building something in the space. And I'm very excited to talk to Gabor because we actually used to work together at Google. And I checked my email. Our first email correspondence was in September of 2006 relating to the first bar camp. So we go way back.

And it's sort of one of those things where, you know, if you think about the wrinkle in time, if we pause kind of like everything that's going on and sort of loop back to the before times to when Twitter was just getting started, what would we do differently now? So that's where we are today. Brian? Yes, I wanted to, again, I'm Brian McCullough from the TechMeme Right Home podcast. The reason that I'm giving that preamble is because also we have Alex Kentruits, and hopefully he's going to use this audio for his show as well. So Alex, introduce yourself and your show.

Hey, everyone. Nice to be back on the feed. I'm Alex Cantorwitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast. You can find it in your podcast app of choice. big technology, not big tech. So don't try that. You might find a different show. But anyway, yeah, this is exciting. I think this is a really important discussion,

and I'm definitely going to be dropping it on my feeds. So I'm excited to see you there. Do you guys mind if I take the first question to Gabor? And basically, just tell us what J2 is. Before we get into the whole Twitter discussion, I want to... J2, J2, J2. T2. T2, T2.

T2. You want to re-ask the question. Like the Terminator. I know. How could I forget that? Okay. What T2 is, before we get into the Twitter discussion, where you are on the project, where the project came from, and if you feel like it's serendipitous that it's coming to pass

right at this moment. So Gabor, after screwing out the name so many times, tell us about T2. Well, first of all, thank you so much for hosting you today. Thank you for this emergency post podcast and getting together at 9 a.m. on a.m. p.t. that is. Some some folks are not in this time zone. So yeah, I'm Gabor. I am the CEO of T2.com. It's not the final name. It is just the first domain that I looked at and it was available for $7.16 on name cheap. So I got it. And I realized the name sounds a little bit like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. So I'm going to find the name. Actually,

That might be very appropriate, so, you know, just saying. Well, the second version was liquid metal, and that seemed to be superior. Yep. I'm not, I think T2 is just the first name that came to mind. We're going to find a great final name for the project. For right now, I'm calling it T2. I think people really understand that name, given that we're working in the same space as Twitter, which also starts with a T. and it's something that I've been thinking about for eight years.

I worked at Twitter as a group product manager from 2014 to 2016. Alex, you recently interviewed Todd Sherman, who's a good friend of mine, who worked at the very same time, and he called that time Dynamic, I believe, on your show, which it certainly was. I relaunched the Logged Out homepage. His time on Twitter? Yeah. Yeah.

Dynamic was like the most generous possible. phrase that you could use for Todd's time. Twitter's never been dynamic. It's always been chaos and a mess. Sorry, it means it's important. Yeah, so in that dynamic time, I was able to relaunch the loggedat homepage to relaunch trends on mobile and work on the consumer app on new user onboarding and a lot of the consumer services that especially new users to Twitter touch and obviously learned a lot from that. It was really telling that the first thing that the new management did under Elon was to relaunch the eLog.com page, which is something that I know works if you're not familiar with what

the product is, but actually tanks the metrics if you are familiar. So I think they've pulled that since, among many other things. But that was my time at Twitter working on the consumer app. And then for the last six and a half years, I worked at Google. And I was in the exec team at the Google's internal incubator called Area 120, which comes from 20% projects, which Google is famous for, 100% of the time. And we have done many zero to one new product incubations. I've overseen 23 of them in casual gaming. We did an online database called tables.

We did multiple short form video experiments where I managed the teams that, worked on zero to one. And I think now is there is an opportunity to do a zero to one new product in the space of short form text content on the web, very similar to what Twitter is already doing. And that's what I've been working on for the last, has it been six weeks. What is your product look like? And how is it? Why? If it has any deviations from Twitter, why? Because it seems like it's a good moment to do something that's exactly like Twitter. I wouldn't even imagine you would need six months to build, you know, a decent minimum viable product.

So what does it look like and what are you changing? You should check out our loggedout homepage at t2.social. It might look familiar. And that is the point. So it's 280 character text maximum. It's replies. It's accounts with handles. It's a familiar format with familiar mechanics and a familiar space.

And that's what we initially. are shooting for, we built that in three weeks. And so what you're seeing is the team so far? The team so far is about seven people who have all come together in the six weeks since we've started. Can I ask you about the inception six weeks ago? Was it people seeing the chaos at Twitter and being like, let's just go, let's jump? You're nodding.

That's basically what happened. six weeks ago was the Friday with the layoffs where Elon laid off half of the Twitter employee base that came as a shock to many including to me and I sort of unearthed at that time some notes that I had taken I took a sabbatical from Google last year in the summer and I was I wrote at the top left corner of the page T2 and I was like what would another better Twitter like product look like and I was sketching it out. So I've been thinking about this for very long. And that Monday after, I talked to my wife and I was like, Erica, maybe I should just do it. And she said, it's got me pretty difficult. And I said, yeah, that's kind of the point. So let's try.

And I tweeted out, okay, I'm going to build a Twitter alternative. And ever since then, it's been nonstop. It's been, I've been just going as quickly as we possibly can on recruiting, on fundraising, on building the actual product. And it's been, it's been a really awesome experience. So what are the differences between that and Twitter or is it a one-to-one clone? And also, before, I just got to say one more thing because I did go, I just went to your logged out homepage. And I try to sign up. And I know there's a wait list. I understand those are important.

But the companies that have wait lists right now are going to shoot. themselves in the foot because this is, I understand you want to get it as well as you can, but this is a, you know, calls on the fire type of moment and having a three screen, uh, onboarding process that doesn't even get you account. Uh, it is going to just, I think we'll say you back. That's a plus one from Brian too, but we'll, we'll get into that in a second. This is going to get good. And this is why we're going as quickly as we can.

So today we have fewer than 100 users on the site, uh, but a week ago, we had zero users on the site. So I'm hoping to kind of go in a similar growth curve. In terms of differences, the format is the same. I want to talk a little bit about that in a moment. The format is the same. Some of the features are missing. We actually launched without the ability to have notifications.

Now we have notifications a week later. We currently don't have ad mentions, which is kind of crucial, and we're going to have that pretty soon. We don't have who to follow. which I really want to call them to follow. We're the hashtags. And then I think the most important feature is really hashtags. And we got the man right here.

So we're going to have those two. At Area 120 in the new product incubator at Google, I always used to talk to teams that are coming to me with new ideas about the tower of hypotheses. And I always told them, how many stacked hypotheses need to be true in order for your product to work. And I think a lot of folks just can't resist the temptation of messing with the format that already works on Twitter, with the 280 characters, with all the mechanics that we just talked about.

And I don't think people are looking for a new platform that has a thousand character limit, for example. I think people are looking for... Or mass it out. Exactly. Yeah, just having like nine different servers and having servers that can ban servers and having to, you know, dig through ways to sign up doesn't seem to be the right way to handle this. I think what you're doing makes a lot more sense minus that wait list. You definitely have, it feels like a vibe on your, I don't know if it's skepticism, doubt, fear, uncertainty. There is a, and I'll say this because the germ for this conversation, of course, was, providing the bull case for why now is the best time to create a Twitter clone or alternative that exists and could be, I don't know, the NOAA's arc for all the people that want to, like,

get off the platform that is, or maybe more like the Titanic, you know, the sinking ship, that is Elon's Twitterverts. And so, hold on Brian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the questions I think is what could that thing be and should it just be a carbon copy clone of Twitter as it exists under new and different management that didn't spend $44 billion on it and fire everybody. I mean, Gabor has got a team of seven people, not 3,000.

And so he obviously has to be very choosy about what features he builds and in what order. And frankly, I mean, you could search on GitHub and there's probably half a dozen, if not more, perfect clones of Twitter. So I think part of this conversation needs to be about understanding the moment that we're in, understanding the technologies that allow Gabor to actually move very quickly and to build something that could be a replacement. And then also to consider the broader ramifications of what the goal, what the purpose is, and whether or not there's a set of principles involved in what is going to be built, or if it's really just a matter of changing the management.

Can I, let's kick off that conversation. And Alex, let me give you my piece because Chris already knows it. I think we're probably aligned. But what I said to Chris offline was all that matters right now is to get the fire hose of the zeitgeist moved elsewhere. If there is a platform, if there's a lily pad that allows the zeitgeist of the people that want to chatter, to go somewhere else where they can just do their chatter. That, you know, Gabor is talking about the pyramid that you build. If you provide that foundation right now, this is the moment that all of the... these folks that provide the fire hose of the zeitgeist would jump there and then they wouldn't

even in my opinion worry yet about things like hashtags or things they just want somewhere to go and also I don't think that people are necessarily worried about oh I'm going to lose all my followers or whatever I think people can reconstitute that in the same way that sometimes you get a new smartphone and instead of restoring from backup you just start fresh I think people would actually that would be appealing to a lot of people so I think Alex Are you with me in the sense that I like Gabor's idea of the pyramid? Let's just get the lily pad first and then we can all work together to build all the other things. Yeah.

And I should state that like I'm not rooting for Twitter's demise. Like obviously. Nor am I. With so, you know, what's going on there. But I'm just looking at this. So I think did I write the tweet that kicked this off basically saying that like someone built a Twitter clone that doesn't suck like mastodonic. It could potentially take off like wildfire. So I'm like looking at this as a.

a business case and I think there is a real business case for it. And I've been saying that to Chris for three or four weeks now, where all you need is a clone, straight clone. Now, if someone builds a better Twitter or a better version and does it in a more thoughtful way, that's fine too, but the straight business case is a straight clone right now in my opinion. Yeah. And so I'm saying this because I'm seeing, you know, all of the energy that is going towards people trying out these clones that are terrible, including mastodon. And I just think that if you build it a little bit simpler, you know, maybe like we're talking about today, like there's a real chance there. And let me try out this little metaphor here.

So I think that the most, many people's relationships with Twitter, it's not working anymore. And there's a lot of baggage there. And it, you know, they're looking for a breakup. And it's not like they're going to be single for a minute and then decide they want to try a thruple. Right. They probably want a normal relationship. Sorry to the Thruple people out there, but they probably want a normal relationship just with a different partner that they can get all the things they had that they enjoyed about being in a

relationship, but with much less baggage. And I think that's why there is this opportunity. And I think that the core part of it would just be, you know, we're talking a little bit about features. Most social media actually takes off when it has the right community. And I think finding the right, that's why I say it could take off

wildfire because I think even if by the way vCs will will invest in something even if there's a 10 20% chance of it working because the payoff is big so what I think would what it would take for something like this to take off would be for the right communities or bunches of communities to say we are all now going to pick up and go there obviously you would have a lot of journalists making this move you know it obviously can't be like just one political perspective but once those communities are in and start picking up momentum it can't mean The network effect is, thing is real.

And like we see with Facebook, the declining network effect thing is real. Insider intelligence expects Twitter to lose like 32 million users by 2024. So that, which means the utility will get less useful. And if those people go somewhere else, it could also start building the momentum that would really enable it to take off. So I think it's a fascinating situation. Obviously, we're going to have entrepreneurs try to make this happen. So we're going to get to see whether it will work or not.

But I mean, sorry, let me just step in, Alex. on this point. Last point. I just think those who are discounting this idea and are saying, have you heard of network effects and no one's leaving Twitter? I think they are not taking into account the real possibility of something like this working. Just to add on to this before Gabor sort of, I think as his perspective, both because I think there's a lot of interesting lessons here from the business side, from the product side, from social media and social networking considerations. And I think it's going to be valuable for us to kind of capture our zeitgeist in this moment so that we can look back six months from now and be like, what do we get right?

What do we get wrong? I think that the thing that Gabor is doing, that's interesting. And I sort of, I don't know what the right answer is, but given Gabor's experience at Area 120, like, you know, he's built products, launch products. And that initial growth curve with the initial set of people who are there is incredibly important. The initial community is kind of what's the tone and sets the sort of long-term trajectory for the thing. And so on the one hand, Alex, I hear you saying, you've got to open this thing up, like, you know, three clicks to get through, like that shit, like no one wants to deal with that or whatever, roughly, I'm paraphrasing.

Or, you know, you just sort of like put in your phone number and like instantly you're on and, you know, then it's like Google Plus and you end up in a ghost town. And I can speak to that because obviously I worked on that. So what Gabor has been doing, and I've been following his tweets. Like, he's like, I'm building, building, building, but also it's not ready. I don't want to open up yet. like it could be too soon and premature and then people show up and they're like wow this party sucks like what's going on here so i think what i'd like to understand about gobor is kind of like one where he's at what needs to be in place in order to sort of usher people in and then to your point Alex how do you get the right set of people to show up doing the right set of things so the party's fucking awesome and everyone wants to be there and then i feel like clubhouse did this really right at the beginning of the pandemic in terms of growing it and then they had to go through hypergrowth and that's kind of what tanked the thing because then it's like everyone's at a party and then no one's at the party.

So I mean, at Clubhouse, I think, sorry, just Clubhouse definitely did it wrong. And they were so exclusive. They did it right for so long. And then, yeah, but they, yeah, anyway, sorry, I go. So anyway, that's, that's what I'd like to learn more about from, from Gabor. The mantra that I've been repeating over and over has been starting small, starting simple, and starting soon. That is the mantra for T2.

So we're not going to reinvent anything. It is in terms of the product that the product outlines that Alex and Brian have given, that's basically the product. I want to echo, let me tell two stories about people that I've talked to very early in this process. One was Paul Graham, who was the Ycombinator founder, who gave me the advice of you got to start with your friends, you got to start small and you got to get it working on a small scale first. I think the notion of let's open it up to everyone kind of leads to an outcome like Google Plus where you have a bunch of people that are disconnected from each other.

So this is why we have the wait list. We're working our way through the wait list right now very slowly but soon very quickly. And we want to get folks on there who also know each other. I whenever I put the current product in front of folks, I just get my, I watched my wife re-onboard yesterday And she was like, where is who to follow? I can't find anyone on here.

So there's a couple of things that have to be good enough in order for this to be able to take off. We're not there yet. We're working on it as quickly as we can. Let me just jump in real quick because it was on something he just said. Let me push back on, and this is what Alex said at the beginning, but maybe this moment in time makes a difference in the sense that where people are actively dipping their toes in other waters, right? they can still, like, it's people are organically finding people on Mastodon, on post, on T2 eventually, like, you know what I'm saying? So like, you don't have to do so much of that because if people are motivated right now,

I'm not motivated to make another social network work when it's just something brand new or whatever, but you have a unique point in time where people are motivated to see if something else would work. And so people could find each other. And I agree with you that finding each other is the key thing. I'm just wondering if this isn't a unique moment in time where you don't have to be, you don't have to do as much heavy lifting for that right now. It's to make Brian's point a little bit clear because I think this is very important.

Like one, what is unique about this moment in time? And two, what is different about this universe of users who are actually quite savvy or sophisticated? I mean, we just went through a pandemic where people learn to use Discord for better or worse. And so their level of sophistication could actually be a little bit further. I totally also agree with your wife. They're like finding people and having a follow function that services people. that she knows is going to be critical.

And yet, it's not quite how it was when Paul Graham, you know, started a Ycombinator. Like, things have sort of evolved. And I guess I'm asking your perspective, whether that is true or whether you would prefer to do the sort of like, you know, tried and true method per se, where it starts very slow, very gradual. There is a red rope. And, you know, if you're not on the other side, you don't get in. Like, how are you kind of modulating the advice from people who have done this before versus also looking at the current moment as being possibly unique or different?

Right. now we're small and we're hoping to grow really, really quickly, really, really soon. And then just on that point, the second thing I was going to mention was David Leap, who started Google Photos, Chris, I think you might remember him. Yes, yes. The advice he always gave us, and we saw it at Area 120 as well, is that smaller teams move faster than larger teams. Because the coordination cost is so high.

Right now we're seven people, it's a perfect size. and the coordination costs are really, really low. I go into our linear. I file a ticket two days later it's there. So it is, our speed is awesome right now, and I love it. And I love the quick turnaround, and we're going to get there quickly. We're not there yet. And Brian, I'm hoping that we're not going to miss the moment.

I don't think the moment's going to change. I'm not seeing things becoming better over at the incumbent. website on a day-to-day basis. Debo, I have two questions for you. First, would you consider, instead of having people apply, having, like, communities apply? So, like, instead of saying one person, hey, do you want to sign up? Maybe, you know, there's a group chat, and they say, we're looking for something new, and you should put that, you might want to put that option.

Second thing I'm curious to hear from you is, what's that? So you mentioned a VC already. What have VC's reactions been during the fundraising stage right now? Publicly, all the VCs are celebrating Elon's takeover of Twitter and saying finally, you know, this is being run the right way and journalists are getting stuck to them in the way they've deserved. But when you're out there trying to raise money, what are they telling you? On the first topic, I love that idea. I need to figure out how to make that turn that into reality and what exactly that form is going to look like. Maybe giving someone like a, you know, if you get accepted, you get 10 extra invite. or something like that.

You can bring your friends along. I don't know. Sorry, go ahead. Like an invite incentive scheme. Like a viral kind of, yeah, where you like have to like bring 10 of your friends to like confirm before you get access or something? That could work.

Oh, that's a good. You know, like a Ponzi scheme, but for social networks. Right, right. I'm going to take that with me from the show. Thank you for any idea. I already forgot the second part. Oh, what, what are VCs reactions?

right? I think this is seen as a jumpball kind of moment. There's a bunch of people trying with various levels of seriousness and it's kind of unclear which approach is going to win. There is large incumbents trying to morph their product into a more Twitter-like product. Instagram? For example. For example. Continue. There are a bunch of folks with wait lists out there. There's folks with a wait list in the beginnings of a product like to do. So it is a jumpball kind of moment and it's not clear who the winner is going to be. And that's sort of the, I would say, the tone right now.

I'm not getting the, oh, we just love Elon above everyone else. But I'm also maybe not talking to the VCs that are most interested in Twitter succeeding. You already got an investment? Like, how are you funding this? Right now I've talked to a lot of angels and have had some early success, but I'm not quite ready to announce fundraising soon. Oh, sorry, I'm not quite ready to announce fundraising news yet. Love that answer. Brian.

Oh, I was raising my hand to put a check in, but that was purely agreed on my part. Let me ask you this about also the environment in terms of like the jump ball analogy is, is such a great one. And even though we've been focusing on the fact that, OK, just do a straight clone. And the first one to do that, maybe that's all it's going to take to be successful. But that also makes me think that this is almost like Chris's dream. Like this is a moment in history where we could reconfigure and refashion things in a more thoughtful way or whatever with the foundations being different. Without, number one, because I wouldn't expect you to have thought this all through yet,

but number two, maybe you wouldn't want to give this away because that would eventually be your differentiator. But do you have any broad ideas? Just on a, I'm talking to the most general level possible. If you had a dream social network now starting from scratch, what is the one thing that you would do that you feel like the incumbents fail at right now? In terms of a completely new opportunity or in terms of short form text type of? Well, right, we'll posit that we're starting with short form text, right? But in the long term, what would ideally you would hope it would evolve into?

That, that, yeah, what it would evolve into that the, what you see out there right now isn't good at. Gotcha. Right now, for T2, we're putting a lot of focus in trust and safety tooling right from the start. So yes, there's that website, but there's also the trust and safety. admin and actually a bunch of our work is going into there. Sarah O, who is a founding team member of T2, who worked out on trust and safety at both at Twitter and at Facebook, is working with me on that. And that's really, really important to us.

And that's why we're building that in from the start. In terms of what social networks can eventually evolve into, between when I left Google in July and when I started T2 on. November 7th, I was in startup idea land. And all I was thinking through was what is going to be the next social media property that could succeed? And how could I start that? And there's still a bunch of tweets about those explorations on Twitter because I diaryed that every single day. And I was exploring a lot of ideas that revolved around new formats because typically new social networks.

launch around and succeed around a new format. Think about TikTok with short form vertical video, Instagram with the square, Twitter obviously with the 280 character limit, and Pinterest with the waterfall. It was always a new format. And then it's a come for the tool, stay for the network kind of mechanic

where you build a great tool to build that content like TikTok with their video editor. And then you stay as a creator and also as part of the audience for the network of the content around. So that's what I was thinking about. I had a prototype that I called Bubble Talk that was around interactive video where the video plays on top and on the bottom you're sort of like popping related content. I was looking at different genres of TikToks. For example, highlight videos from podcasts or

vodcasts, which tend to go really, which tend to get really successful on TikTok really, really early, especially if they're very crisp and there's like an immediate takeaway. So that's what I was looking at. I think that's one direction. The other direction is actually something that Elon laid out very early on in the takeover, which is what if we make Twitter or one of the existing networks into a super app? I thought that was actually a really good concept. I'd love to see him do it. I think there is actually a ton of opportunity in there. But I think you need to already have an established network to make that work. And also specifically in the U.S., people are used to having sort of like one app per thing.

whereas in Asia, it's more like I have my we chat and it does everything for me. So there would need to be a cultural shift as well, which I think you could pull off. But TBD. That's interesting. I guess one of the things that I have to bring up because Brian did point out how, one, this could be a golden opportunity to reset a lot of things. One of the conversations, of course, that Brian and Alex and I have had is about the negative, both externalities and internality.

of the impacts of social technology and social media on, I mean, just humanity writ large. There are different camps, I think, that believe in different outcomes or reasons why you might move in one direction or another. So, for example, for Jack, censorship is very important, and censorship resistance is very important. You said that you're starting with trust and safety, you know, from the outset. And for a lot of social platforms, you know, just getting the... the platform even working is the most important thing.

And doing whatever it takes to get users hooked and engaged is necessary to then ride that wave and then get over the hump of kind of resistance to then becoming sort of a, you know, a place that people actually go and hang out in. So that's an interesting tension. Another tension is around centralization versus decentralization. And of course, this is something that I'm very curious just about your perspective on. I think, as you said, having a small team allows you to move fast. and innovate and iterate product very quickly.

Decentralization works against moving quickly in many respects, especially when the coordination cost happens at an industry-wide level. So it's fine for email to have been invented in the 70s or for HTTP to be invented back then as well, but trying to come up with a protocol now, whether it's activity pub or app protocol or blue sky or something from Web3 or Matrix, whatever. There's a lot of those out there.

The coordination costs seem to be, again, at odds with product. So when you're thinking about this and you're thinking about trust and safety, I guess my question is, you know, are you thinking about this largely from a business perspective where if you could have a similar type of success to TikTok and stay centralized, that actually would be your dream or your goal? Or is there some interest to changing the competitive landscape and the media environment in which people participate?

I know that there's a lot in there, but like that feels like really essential to have a sense for given what you're building. Yeah, so right now at this point, T2 is a centralized approach. It's not a Mastodon instance. It's not part of the Fediverse, et cetera. And I think that comes from, I'm not totally sure how to make trust and safety, accountability happen in a fully federated world. And take doxing, for example, which is the topic du jour.

it's very hard to see how you can have anti-doxing measures in the platform if the platform is fully distributed. So just to put a point on that, do you then support kind of what Elon is doing in like turning off links to Mastodon? Because Mastodon now is a distributor of the information that he doesn't want to have on Twitter. So I think my perspective on this is the policy on the Twitter rules. If you go to the Twitter rules and there's a section on personal information, it talks about. about sharing personal information on Twitter. And so I think that's why he banned the account that shared the whereabouts of his private chat. It doesn't talk about other things you might link to. So I think there's a number of places where on the internet, on the vast internet,

where those things could be found as well. Yeah. So all of these are just incredibly difficult questions to answer. I think they're easier to answer if you have a clear set of rules that applies to your website, which is our goal. And so in this particular case, and I don't want to like overly fix it on this one thing, but given that you said trust and safety is, you know, very important for the start, I guess like do you have a set of principles or thoughts about how you're going to approach, like who gets to feel safe and who gets to feel trusted on your platform? we don't have them articulated yet i think in terms of the the spirit of the rules it's actually

going to be pretty similar to what twitter's rules are today i think it's very important to me that we go maybe one level deeper in articulating them and around consistently enforcing them um there's one the reasons why we're currently still small because we're still working these these things out and as we go bigger, I think we're going to have to invest more. It is kind of remarkable that Elon came in under the baner of free speech and now is seeming to ban much more readily than the old regime. So we'll see what happens with that, but I found that to be kind of interesting. So one question for you, Gabor.

The main problem that networks like yours and other Twitter copycats will run into is that they'll become hang out. for one type of political persuasion. You know, the cool thing about Twitter, despite its faults, is that people from all political stripes are there. And, you know, the discussions, you know, they dunk on each other and they get mean and they get mad. But you know when you're on Twitter,

you're going to find Democrats and Republicans and people who are more extreme than them and people who are moderate. So how do you, you know, how do you then go out there and say, look, we're building this thing. It's an alternative to Twitter, right? now like the view is Twitter is like going to be a conservative network given who's running it. How do you end up not just being kind of like liberal social media utopia and a network

that gators to everyone? I'm not hoping to be parley or truth social. That's not the goal. And I don't want to start this as any particular leaning politically. And so I think it kind of starts where you started your question, which is who are the first people on the this network. And so as we're looking at our wait list, we're kind of looking at the lens of let's not, let's make this a space for everybody and not just for a particular type of person. And that's sort of part of the plan to make that happen. Alex, I actually had a question for you. And this is sort of inside baseball for what we do.

But on my show, I've been doing a sort of thing like what percentage is Twitter still alive for the purposes of my show, which is if more people that I go to to get the chatter that I write my show about leave, the percentage goes down until it becomes zero, right? So I'm more of an aggregator of the chatter that's out there, and you, Alex, do more of the, let's have a conversation offline and give me background. But for your purposes, given that your job is similar to mine, have you seen a degradation of the zeitgeist, of the chatter on Twitter for the purposes of what you do over the last couple weeks? Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, if you go strictly by like, is Twitter alive or dead looking at usage? It seems like usage is pretty high.

I mean, Elon has tweeted charts of Twitter hitting all-time highs for daily active users. I've met people in the past few months who are there strictly because they're Elon fans and they're kind of curious. They never tried out Twitter before, but now they're like, well, I wonder what's going on. That's a very positive sign for Twitter. I do think that the drawback is that the platform only talks about Twitter these days. So, you know, there's a story. There's a rule in media. Don't make the story about yourself.

And the reason is, you know, because at the end of the day, you're, you know, making it about yourself won't be that interesting. And if it is, it won't be interesting for too long. ultimately being open to the possibility of all interesting things in the world is actually what will make your media company and Twitter is a media company will make it the best. So if Twitter becomes the Elon channel

which has been recently it has a much lesser chance of succeeding than if it sort of fulfills its purpose which is being a company. So your question is degradation in that case it has. Sure. And obviously I follow the story I've had to unfollow Elon. I've

I've had to mute the word Elon, mute the word Musk. And I still get a ton of Elon stuff on my timeline, but it's actually balanced out the singular topic that it used to be. And I think that, you know, it's going to be tough. The network's going to have to, like, move away from that because that's what it's been recently. Right. Well, and to give you, like, two tangible examples, you know, like, let's say Apple unveils their goggles, the AR-V-R thing. two months from now and I don't see tweets from Nilai or Casey Newton, right?

Now, there are other places, both of them have publishing platforms where I'm sure I'll get their opinions on those things. But in this, in a similar way, like, you know, you and I both troll Twitter and places like that, trowl, that maybe is the word, to find, you know, what, wait a second. Right, right, right. Yeah, trawling, trawling, trawling. to see what the VC take is, what the founder take is. And so that's where I'm starting to see specific angles where a new Apple product, I can't take the temperature as easily because people are starting to go away.

The network is starting to degrade a little bit. So I was just curious if you're feeling that's sort of the early tremors of that as well. Not really. I think a lot of people say that they're going to quit Twitter. It's amazing. I don't know if you've like scrolled through accounts of people who say that they're down on Twitter. Almost to a single, like almost to a person, you look at their likes and they're like spending all day on it still. And some of them like, I've quit and they keep tweeting about how they quit.

And it's like, I don't think you fully understand the meaning of quit given what I'm seeing on your account. And I think mostly it's because there's not an alternative. So that's that kind of goes back to the core of our conversation. I was going to, okay, I'm going to jump in here because I think this is relevant. Like, not to overly center by myself, but like my experience in this is the thing, like, where, you know, the chasm is starting to be crossed, where I'm starting to see at least some, you know, sort of bridge across that kind of allows me to start changing my behavior. Look, like, changing behavior is incredibly difficult.

Most people are super lazy and not like lazy in like a pejority sense, but like they're, you know, calorie preserving humans. Like, that's their job. So everything that we create for them has to, you know, give them a little bit more juice out of whatever calories they're already expending. So point being, you know, as I said, I took my account private and I didn't really know what that would mean or what would happen. It turns out that since I already follow like 8,000 people, which is kind of absurd, all those 8,000 people are still seeing my stuff. So my level of engagement actually has gone up. It's actually like super perverse and very

strange, but also it's sort of an interesting privilege to be at a point where now I get to approve everyone that follows me. And there's already a lot of people who are sort of grand personed in to see myself. Now, let me explain. That's interesting. Yeah, like it's unexpected. I'm trying to actually spend more time on other platforms. So I am spending more time on Mastodon. I am trying to, and Alex, I know you can hate the U.S.,

but I think it's where it is. And I agree with you. It is too hard. I don't think that that's like, it's not done. You know, I feel like if you think about Mastodon, as you think about, well, if you had the experience of Twitter in 2006 or 7, and you think about another, maybe it's not, maybe it'll not happen fast enough, but five years of UI, UX improvement,

perhaps it'll actually get there. So let's set that aside. I'm at least trying to sort of make that effort while also like being, kind of having feet in both places. I mean, this is why I have some aspiration or hope that decentralization could be something that allows for choice and innovation in parallel. And so, you know, I'm going to be pushing Gabor to like consider interoperability and decentralization while also being very,

you know, like, I understand the limitations. I understand like the risks. On the other hand, you know, I started something called the DZER project in 2007 or eight to try to decentralize social networks. And we built up a bunch of these protocols that make this possible now. So it just seems like a missed opportunity to like consider how that might work. Now, anyways, I'm just saying like I am actually making the effort and still getting sucked in. So to your point, Alex, I see it. I feel seen.

I also feel called out. And so it's complicated. The last thing that I wanted to ask about, though, and I think this is incredibly important, is about the incentive structure of the platform and money, monetization, and payments. And I'm bringing this up specifically because post news, or post, I don't even know how to pronounce the title of the thing. Nome's thing exists. Micropayments are built in from the start. It is a Twitter clone with a serif font. and with all due respect to Nome, I find it incredibly boring so far.

So what I'm wondering is the incentive of participation on these platforms could be very important and powerful to driving certain people to engage. Now, just as, and I think Alex, you might have reported on this, creator funds are starting to go away. They're starting to diminish that whole idea for creating some stickiness or loyalty with like paying people to post. It might not be a long-term viable option. So I'm going to bring this back to go.

Boar, when it comes to T2 or whatever it might be called, like when you think about the incentive structure and you think about the advertising model and then you think about payments, what do you see, you know, in terms of the future of your platform and how do you not, I guess, succumb to or maybe you do succumb to the original sin of social media, which Jack Dorsey says is advertising. We don't have any immediate plans to monetize T2. Why would anybody invest in? because we need to get the users in the lifeboat to Alex's...

That's a different question, right? So it's first building the thing, and then modernization comes later, which is the trope of social media, I will say, and then you end up, you know, if you get a sufficient amount of usage in the... We must do advertising, because that's the only way to scale this. So it feels like... That's why I think the post-news thing is interesting,

because micropayments are built in from the start, and that might set the culture around tipping, which then over some period of time creates new, norms and behaviors. For example, on Discord or Twitch, like, tipping is normal. Twitter added tipping, and I got zero tips, like, the entire year. Like, it's, it's kind of ridiculous. So I guess, like, I understand growth and the need for growth. Absolutely. Like, as a product person, I would completely agree with your perspective. At the same time, like, we can't ignore the last 16 years of Twitter's development and the consequences of the

advertising model on the direction that social media has gone. here's the thing on the day after the layoffs where Elon laid off half of the workforce Jack tweeted out I am so sorry to have bloated Twitter I probably let it grow too far too fast and I think a lot of the issues

that we've seen around advertising and around the business models have been around the cost base being so darn large. You had Stephanie Link recently on your podcast, Alex, and she had some numbers around, like how much Facebook has grown since March of 2020, since the beginning of COVID, how much all of these large companies have grown. And I think some of that growth was actually reckless,

and then it had to cause the platforms to set the slider on what is acceptable advertising, What is acceptable targeting? What is the price of our subscription? What else do we try to make some money out of this? Too far into aggressive mode. And so part of this is around staying small, staying lean, which allows us to go really fast. I don't think that for the next months, for sure,

we'll be monetizing T2 in any way. Though people should have told me that we should charge for first name handles. but I'll think about that. We'll think about that. We're not monetizing right now. I think part of it is let's not blow to team. Let's not bloat the business. Let's figure out a monetization model that works.

I personally don't think it's micropayments or tipping and then figure out a responsible way to do it. So you're going to do advertising. That's what I heard. Listen, we got Gabor here on a Saturday morning, and so we want to be respectful of his time. Thanks for answering the bat signal for this emergency episode. Gabor, let's let you say any final words first, and then Alex, you should as well, and then Chris wrap it up. There's three hosts running this thing right now, so it's hard.

But hopefully we can bring this to a landing without anybody crashing the plane. I love the three hosts, and I also love you all disagreeing with each other. And that's been really fun to watch. Well, thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed this. I am so excited about what's next for our little platform T2 at T2. at t2.com. I hope you all sign up for the waitlist.

We're going to be working through the wait list really, really quickly, as quickly as we can. We're trying to go as fast as we can to provide people that lifeboat from the current dominant platform for short form text. And I really appreciate you setting this up and sending the bat signal and just really grateful to be here. Thank you. Yeah, I'll also say thanks. It's been great. Really good to hear your thoughts, Gaborz. And I appreciate you making yourself available and answer some questions. And you, Alex, for answering from Germany, answering the back signal from Germany. That's right. Yeah. Always happy to. Always great to talk with you.

guys. All right, guys. I hope to see people on big technology podcast. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. All right, guys, this is awesome. Again, as has been expressed, thank you guys for showing up for this. I would encourage everyone that's listening, like try out these apps, try out these products,

like be willing to experiment. Now if any time is the time to just see what's out there. I think there's a great opportunity for social media to really reconsider where it's at, where it's been and there's a lot of really talented people who are building things. So I, for one, I'm excited about what Cabor is building. I'm excited for you to come up with the name, liquid metal, whatever it might be. I'm excited to get access. And, you know, sure, we'll meet up in Berkeley and say hello.

So, all right, guys, thanks again for tuning in. This is another episode of the TechMeme Ryan-Up Experience, along with Big Technology Podcast. Signing on.