The messy future of social media
jacobobryant.com
jacobobryant.com
However, it's frankly foolish to think it's going to take over. I know I can't convince any of my friends to use Mastodon, or anything ActivityPub-related. It's not because it's too complicated (though for some reason people still think that's what's holding it back), and it's not because it needs more development time, it's because nobody uses it. People are stuck on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram because they're designed to retain you, no matter the cost. Every second you spend browsing is designed to lock you in further, generating more ad revenue. The social structure of these platforms is meticulously designed to make people feel like they've got more stake in the platform; you follow celebrities to stay 'in' on the gossip, you follow smart people in some faux investment of intellectual capital, and you follow successful people because you think that basking in the starlight will impart something valuable to you.
Of course, none of that happens. At the end of the day, it's just people scrolling through brief text/video blurbs where they retain little to nothing from their interaction, just adding more lubrication for the money-making machine to chew through. Oh, and if any of these smaller, federated platforms do gain traction, they're going to have to fight off billions of dollars in vested interest to keep them out of the game. The big influencers will stay in the pockets of the big players because they treat them well. The big players will ramp up their marketing campaign, acquire newer platforms or create their own spinoffs that diametrically oppose a free internet. There's always a bigger content silo to be made, and they're the ones with the resources to do it.
With regards to social media I feel as if we are living through the proverbial lead in gasoline phase of this particular story.
Still derive some value from forums though.
You need cheering up, so I'll direct you to the @RyanAir twitter account. Try not to wet yourself! ;-)
Who needs to be convinced are the content creators.
What we really could use are content management systems that can publish directly to the open web and then be interacted with by compatible systems. CNN.com and House.gov, for example, could be host systems that provide content out to the wider Fedi.
People posting to Facebook and Twitter are content creators. A big reason those platforms are so popular is that they make it dirt simple to post, i.e., to create content.
> What we really could use are content management systems that can publish directly to the open web and then be interacted with by compatible systems.
We already have those: websites. CNN.com and House.gov already provide content to the entire Internet. But for the average person it's much easier to just post to FB or Twitter than fire up their own website. Also, if they post on FB and Twitter they know people will read it, whereas if they post on their own website, who knows who will read it?
They've gone where the money is. So long as YouTube and Twitch write checks, people are going to make content on those platforms. They're not going to spend their own time and money (on top of content production) to host the content or run some FediVerse server.
Content creators could jump ship and run their own ads but then they've got increased costs/effort for promotion. They also aren't going to get good payouts unless they've got a huge audience that will come with them.
That was once called RSS, RDF or Atom ...
I don't know if this model would ever become more popular than FB/Twitter/etc, but I think it could become popular enough that anyone who wants to ditch social media can do so without feeling like they're missing out on something.
Heck, I like Mastodon a lot too, but having tried I could not switch simply because the people I follow (the AI research community) is largely not present there.
I know of several people who have been temp-banned by fbk, and there are certainly many more - and those folks start looking for alternatives to day it happens, and they could each bring 6 or more people with them, even if only for 30 days or so.. so "designed to retain you, no matter the cost" - may be true in regards to 'no matter the cost to users' - they seem to be spending money to over-moderate and dis-retain some.
Also I believe one of the six bills up in congress about reigning in tech overpower, has mentions of making data more portable.. I saw something where fbk made it so you can export your posts to wordpress.. as preemptive as that may be - it does not make it a thing to pull your groups info, marketplace stuff.. and it's possible we could have legislative action to make it easier to mirror stuff from the giants to other portals - this would make it much easier to transfer regular use off their platforms..
It's interesting you mention influencers - that can be a big piece of the puzzle with outsized network effects - one reasons I keep kicking the idea of having 'theUnbanned' or uncensored.. ungagged - something better sounding.. or something as a gateway to the fediverse.. it's not unusual to see popular people kicked form platforms and it shouldn't be too hard to take advantage of that with an easy to spin up new network for them.. I've seen more than a dozen opportunities from twitch in the past so many months..
Wouldn't a twitter bridge fix this? Then people could just fellow these people on mastodon or whatever
Indeed. Unfortunately google and friends disagree. Interchangeable and light is the opposite of walled garden, captured audience and tracking/ads everywhere
Anything lacking that addictive quality is not going to come close to disrupting the established players. That takes more than people geeking out over protocols or raging against ads and powerlessly waving their fists at the big FANG bullies.
Money for example. It takes a lot of cash to get anything decent off the ground. People working on some low level protocols in their spare time doesn't get the job done. Whenever money is involved, power follows. And people with power will raise barriers to protect and nurture that power. That's how walled gardens are created.
The counter move here is to get organized with a foundation and make sure that gets funded properly. That has worked extremely well for a range of OSS projects. The Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, WikiMedia, etc. The list is quite long. But fundamentally any time investor cash gets involved, walled gardens are a foregone conclusion.
I think the main reason why they're hard to beat is the first mover advantage of becoming the first popular networks of their kind.
This advantage creates multi-sided markets. There are strong incentives for businesses to build on top of those platforms enabled by reaching a critical mass of users, this advantage is converting networks into a self promotional flywheels pulling in more and more users.
It gets addictive because businesses usually know their audience and journey they're on and create content incentivizing them to take the next step in that journey.
Of course it's addicitve for users if you can anticipate their next step, and for businesses if they have all those micro targeting options just a click away. The easy way wins.
This would destroy most of the financial value in Meta though.
Make the new networks compatible with the current ones, even without their authorization.