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.
But you gotta admit Usenet was super niche and was never ever on its way to becoming a thing usable by people from all walks of life. This is why AOL became a thing…and folks like us similarly criticized it as a commercial walled garden!
While that was true about AOL and also true about the web today, going back to clunky services only techies can use isn’t the answer, and the current state of the fediverse is pretty clunky. But I have high hopes for how this space will evolve.
It’s funny you use AOL and Usenet as the examples… in March 1994, AOL started offering Usenet access to all its users, and regardless of anyone’s personal opinion on that, there followed many years when the slick corporate offering existed as a gateway to the community-operated federated network, and technologically it all worked fine. The only reason that model got replaced with “Facebook user <-> Facebook app <-> Facebook protocol and network <-> Facebook advertising and business model” was because any company with the financial ability to make it happen also had the financial motivation to create its own little walled garden for its users to exist in instead.
They actually might have looked at what happened to AOL (had a walled garden and were wildly profitable, chose to add to it something compelling that anyone else could also provide, then got out-competed on that offering from all sides and reduced to a footnote) as an example of why they needed to create their own little walled garden from the beginning.
What do you mean? Usenet was insanely popular back in the day, and not reserved to techies at all. All you needed was an email client, it was way easier than the fediverse, and a million times more polished.
Most of my family have to this day never even heard of Usenet, but they all have Instagram and Facebook accounts. The scale of Usenet “popularity” isn’t even remotely in the ballpark of the modern social web/apps. There are more people on meta apps than people who even had access to the internet when Usenet was relevant.
I don’t understand. Of course your normie family hasn’t heard of the big social app of 30 years ago, how is that even relevant ?
The scale of Usenet popularity was enormous for the time, roughly 15% of internet users were on usenet. In terms of today’s internet population that would be around 800M. That’s not niche, and that’s definitely in the ballpark of modern social media (double the size of reddit). There were a million different groups on a million different subjects, it was not for techies only you had active groups about gardening, ancient greek philosophy, writing, etc…
But most of all it was not clunky or difficult to use. The reason AOL “won” is because they shipped a quadrillion of those CD-Roms with free internet hours around the world, prompting people to try the internet out and those new users could discover chatrooms in one click. I’ll agree with you that the fediverse in its current state is clunky but usenet back in the day was far from it. It had fewer functionalities but was very straightforward to use.