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.
Tell me you never experienced Usenet or the internet before Facebook and friends fucked it up, without telling me. We literally used to have all the things he’s talking about, with much less of the drawbacks, before the internet became commercialized. Now the commercial web’s unsuitability has finally reached the point of undeniability, and we’re trying to figure out how to get back to that.
Yeah, and the author all but freely admits that. But they’re apparently willing to throw all that away to have it “feel like everyone’s there.”
Maybe this is me being uncharitable, but to be blunt it sounds like he just wants to feel like he’s sitting at the cool kids’ table.
I think they mostly just want to be able to have parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers. Arnold Schwarzenegger would give advice occasionally on the bodybuilding subreddit, IIRC. Having your favorite YouTuber dip into the comments section for a quick moment just to say a thing or two was something Reddit/Twitter had that was really cool.
The fediverse kind of has that. Shout-out to Technology Connections, who is on Mastodon - @TechConnectify - as well as Not Just Bikes, who is @notjustbikes on Mastodon but is considering moving to Bluesky. (If you’re on Kbin, you can follow them from Kbin at https://kbin.social/u/@TechConnectify@mas.to and https://kbin.social/u/@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com respectively.) But most influencers aren’t on the fediverse, outside of huge nerds.
The issue is that until we have a Reddit-like service which has a plurality of Reddit users and a Twitter-like service that has a plurality of Twitter users we’re going to be in this weird state. Both Reddit and Twitter still exist. They still have people who make posts there. Some celebrities still post there. While Twitter is finally collapsing due to its dumb rate limiting, Reddit has enough bots to maintain the illusion of being an active community, and plenty of Google SEO to get new users to move there. It’s obvious that - while splintered - both those places aren’t going to magically disappear.
Then we have Bluesky (which I predict will be a monster once it comes out of invite-only mode, if only because it’s built up so much hype) and Threads. Both are targeting Twitter specifically, and I predict that one will win. Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) is also working on his own Twitter clone, which may be a dark horse in the race as well.
I’m not confident that the fediverse will “win” on the Twitter clone side. While I expect that Threads will get a lot of “normal” people on it who use Instagram, a lot of the fediverse is cutting Threads off ASAP to try and prevent “embrace, extend, extinguish” from leeching people from Mastodon into Threads. Bluesky seems to be a frat house at the moment (from what I’ve heard) but it may self-regulate. It’s already seen a recent spike due to Twitter’s rate limiting.
My prediction is in 2-3 years we will be back in the same game we were playing before, but with new players.