Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everyone’s there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps, where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nicki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody together, hanging out in a single space. Now there are none.

I’d love to follow that up with, “and here’s the new thing coming next!” But I’m not sure there is one. There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It’s not just that there’s no sufficiently popular place; I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn’t be that hard. It’s just that the platform doesn’t exist. It’s not LinkedIn or Tumblr, it’s not upstarts like Post or Vero or Spoutable or Hive Social. It’s definitely not Clubhouse or BeReal. It doesn’t exist.

Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.

    • EnglishMobster
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      11 year ago

      Eh, as much as I’d like to believe that article it sounds a bit far-fetched. “Using Putin’s nukes to force the issue…” of the information space? Of Twitter? Elon controls one social media site; one that’s bleeding users at that. How on earth is the issue going to be forced with nukes? Is Putin going to say “Everyone join Twitter/Bluesky/this new Twitter-like protocol or else?”

      Like, I can be onboard with the thought that Bluesky is workshopping protocols that Twitter may one day adopt. That’s fine. The article mentions that Bluesky originated at Twitter… but didn’t mention that Bluesky is now fundamentally separate from Twitter, and has been. They make it seem like Twitter still has a controlling interest when that isn’t the case.

      Do I believe Jack and Elon and friends? Yeah, I can buy that. Do I think they’re both in some weird Mars cult? Yeah, I can buy that too. But everything beyond that seems like a crazy conspiracy theory, and none of the “questions/answers” that article has really sells me on the idea that this is some doomsday plan to destroy governments.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Eh, as much as I’d like to believe that article it sounds a bit far-fetched. “Using Putin’s nukes to force the issue…” of the information space?

        I think what is meant is the idea of that because of Putin’s nukes we should capitulate to Russia and stop sending Ukraine money. This idea (and the idea of the power of bitcoin) is spread by RFK Jr, who Jack endorses in the US Presidential race.