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.
Over the past decade or so, gamers have been psychologically conditioned to accept lootboxes and microtransactions as a standard part of the gaming experience (especially younger people who don’t even remember a time before lootboxes).
Similarly, I think the “corporate internet” era has also forcefully conditioned FOMO onto the majority of people. So many people coming over to Lemmy/Kbin have literally said something along the lines of, “I don’t like the fragmentation, if I’m not subscribed to every single instance then I feel like I’m missing out.”
The missing out part is a real frustration of this format. I’m finding it difficult to find those niche communities full of passionate discussion like people keep saying exist. I’ve seen several communities of the same name, none of which are very active, but which would be active if there was just one of them.
The individualized instances and communities have their benefits, but they come at the cost of discoverability and activity-per-community.
I don’t think you’re being uncharitable. The author sounds like they can’t cope with anything that isn’t slick, polished, and already popular. Frankly, Lemmy doesn’t need people who can’t deal with growing pains.
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.
I think there is at least some evidence that Bluesky is not competing with Twitter. See https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d
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.
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.
Honestly, that’s kind of even sadder, IMO.
(Especially when you consider most of those celebrities weren’t running their own accounts, they were handled by PR teams, so you weren’t actually interacting with them, either. But even if they had been-- like, guys, go make IRL friends. I know that’s agonizingly hard, I struggle with it too, but this shit ain’t healthy.)
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.
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.
It’s not either or. Usenet doesn’t have to be as popular and well known as Facebook to be legitimate and successful.
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.
Spam was a serious issue for Usenet.
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