Mastodon has become the most recognizable alternative to Twitter lately, but there's more than enough time for others to emerge. Former Waze CEO Noam Bardeen is now trying with the Post to create “a civic place to discuss ideas.” learn from experts, journalists, individual authors and each other; speak freely; and have fun.”
Noam Bardeen ran Waze for 12 years (until 2021), and Post is “what's next”. It is described at a high level as “A social platform for real people, real news and civic conversations”. LinkedIn notes that the start date is May 2022, and that the Post buzz started last week.
The introductory post clearly hints at the early days of social media:
Remember the days when social media gave you pleasure, introduced you to big ideas and cool people, and really made you smarter? Remember when it didn't waste your time and make you angry or upset? When could you disagree with someone without being threatened or insulted? We want this back in Post.
As far as features go, “messages of any length” will be supported by the ability to “comment, like, share and post content with your opinion” Longer-form content will somewhat interfere with the fast digestibility that Twitter is famous for.
One big difference, which is reflected in the post.news URL, is the following trio of features that will require support from publications:
- Buy individual articles from different news providers premium so you can access different viewpoints, not just the ones you subscribe to.
- Read content from different sources in a clean interface without navigating to different websites
- Tip content creators that are engaging to help them create more with built-in micropayments
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While I admire the people of Mastadon, this is too hard for most people. Here is my page in the post pic.twitter.com/RrY0CGn9oP
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher), November 18, 2022
When it comes to content moderation, there are rules that will be strictly enforced[d]”. ; with “help from our community” in deference to the crowdsourced nature of Waze. The user interface as seen above is relatively simple for a social network.
There is a long waiting list for joining the Post – currently [update: 125,000 registrations] as of Sunday evening (PT). This is partly due to the fact that many of the core features are still under development, since the “first version of Search” is just launching today. Meanwhile, the “Personalized Feed”/following feature has not yet been implemented so that all users currently see the same content. As of Saturday, about 1,000 users have been able to “help test the system.” As of Sunday evening, 3,500 users have been activated.
You can sign up for the waiting list here by entering your place in the queue.
