This is yet another bath time ideas. How can we replace Twitter with something that is not rocket science? I think we can simulate Twitter using IRC. And these are how:

  • Each user will be given their own room. So, if I’m neofreko then I’ll have #neofreko
  • Twitter bot join every user room
  • Who following who will be kept in a dedicated database
  • Each time user post a message in his (or any) room, twitter bot will relay this message to other user room based on the who-following-who database
  • User can leave their room so they may have been replaced by a bot as well. We may want to keep an alias table for user-bot and real user
  • This user-bot will “provide” web-based UI so user is not required to join the room but, still, can access their room from external world. Accessing here may mean: views archive, views replies, and sends messages
  • Twitter bot can keep all recent messages to build the public timeline

So, now we have

  • Other can see my twitter page by visiting my room, or accessing the web-based UI.
  • At any given time there’ll be at least two user instance in any given room, ie: user-bot and twitter-bot
  • No, the room won’t be available on public. Instead it’s only available in twitter LAN(d). Thus we can prevent evil bot from joining.

And then we must consider

  • Netsplit issue. IRC wizard please confirm this: will this problem gone is all user coming from localhost?
  • Security. Whether this IRC is vulnerable

Now, who want to fund me?! ;)

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