Considering that I don't know a single real-life person that is on app.net, I wouldn't consider it an alternative to anything.

The same used to be true of Twitter.

Yes but early-days Twitter did not have to compete with current-day Twitter when it was trying to grow.

It had to compete with general ignorance of its value. Many would argue that's a more difficult hurdle.

I know quite a bit of people and common thing between all of them is that they are quite influential. They have been irritated by things like this.

And they may convince others to join App.net. Granted that many people will avoid App.net just because you have to pay for it and common internet guy will never realize what Twitter is doing. Still, if even top 10-20% of people who I follow go to App.net, I will follow!

No, they're making sure users flock to twitter.com instead. And it's been effective, since I use the web interface instead of Tweetbot now!

Since tweetbot still works, why did you migrate from it?

app.net is still laughable as a replacement for twitter. With the new apps it's now convenient to use a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people, but it's still a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people.

Not sure how $36/year is "rich". Cable TV costs more than that per month!

Personally, I'm sick of being sold to. Ad-supported is not the only business model in town and I'm not sure when using an ad-supported service over a paid one became a virtue. If this makes me "rich", ok.

App.net is just proof that at least a few people agree with me.

Cable TV has a much better value proposition than a Twitter alternative. There's no free alternative to cable TV with a comparable feature set.

I do think it's an exaggeration to say that app.net caters to the rich, but I can guarantee you that the demographics skew much more upper class, between being an app that is charged for and a service that mostly has interested hackers (who, nowadays, tend to be an affluent bunch, for better or worse).

You may not be aware such a thing exists, but I'd consider http://www.freesat.co.uk or or even http://www.freeview.co.uk to be (subscription) free alternatives to cable TV.

Maybe no free alternative, but I avoid it like the plague. I watch good TV programming after-the-fact by buying DVDs.

Edit: Also, the value of a service like TV is something determined by the individual end-user. I don't think TV is more valuable than Twitter for everyone.

What do you mean by "top users"? The top users are those with tons and tons of followers and those followers are what make Twitter valuable to them. Not any feature or any good developer relationships. Do you think any celebrity or company is going to want to put their message behind a paywall? I know I'd have a hard time moving enough of my friends to something like App.net to make it interesting for me.

It sucks that Twitter is blocking cool development like this, but they've managed to become "a place where people are" (which is no easy task) and it's a mistake to underestimate that value.

To me, it seems like they may have a long term plan for monetization which requires users to visit the website rather than using a client.