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.
They took so long to see how companies have been turning Internet to a place of communication and sharing into a cable TV with comment section. And to be honest, after seeing what happens when you put everyone in the same place, at the same time, with the same tools, I think I prefer there’s some effort to be taken to join a community, and keep those communities small. Makes trolling harder, if you have to take your time to join a community, you aren’t going to burn your account so easily. Moderation is way easier if the community is small (there’s absolute horror stories and sh*tshows about this in the social media companies) and yes… I’d rather have a place that is run by volunteers and the community itself, lest we have another Spez telling us what we can or we can’t do with our community.
I don’t know, I’ve never given a f⁺ck about talking with a celebrity (and when you “could” it was an illusion most of the time, community managers are a thing, you know, and in 20.000 messages, yours not gonna stand out, my sweet summer child) and the company run Internet lately sounds more and more like a giant ad gallery, where everyone wants to sell you something and maybe, you get something worth paying attention to.
And of course, The Verge isn’t going to give the Fediverse a good bump and a wink, no, they are going to bash it because for them, it is better that another company takes on the place Twitter, Reddit and the rest is leaving now… the other option is Communism, Satan or something!