We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.
I don’t think people want that. I mean some people, sure. But the network effect is real and I think the market will always demand one audience.
Keep in mind this doesn’t mean it has to be centralized. It could be decentralized but connected. Isn’t that kinda what Bluesky or Mastadon are shooting for? Decentralized but interoperable?
Besides the depth and stickiness of topical communities, these sites also tend to be almost universally friendly and helpful, even to n00bs and outsiders. It would be a tragedy if they were to be replaced by a one-size-fits-none platform.
In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."
The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.
In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.
The strength and weakness of Twitter was dumping "everyone" into a very flat network. Increasingly that just sets people at war with each other.
I don't know if Mastodon is the answer, but the ability to separate your posts by type would be a massive improvement. The ability to post on different servers makes it possible.
Let's do some wild guesstimation here.
Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Let's apply that to social connections and assume that any given person only cares about interacting with 10% of any given crowd. Let's actually be even more generous and assume people are an order of magnitude pickier than that: for most people, 99% of other people are crap.
Meanwhile, Dunbar's number says that a human only cares about socializing with up to 150 people. Dunbar's number itself is kind of weird pseudoscience, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is an upper bound (or at least diminishing returns), so let's be generous and go an order of magnitude higher and say that a given person won't care about interacting with more than 1,500 specific people.
Putting these together, it suggests that being a member of a network of 1.5 million individuals ought to suffice to give anyone all the social connections they could ever want.
Of course, it took silly reasoning to arrive at this precise number, but I think there's an element of truth to it. The limits of the human ability to socialize mean that, beyond a certain point, the size of the network itself is no longer the limiting factor on the ability to find people to socialize with.
- Social network (context network)
- Social media (content network)
Every successful network will become media. Media is winner takes all. One app defines the medium and assembles the critical mass network.
Facebook is now a media app, though it started as a “network.” Networks are static. They don’t bring value as they age, so the networks always turn into media apps.
Every social media starts with a vertical, but there are no vertical social medias. Every social media started with the cohort most in need of their particular medium. Musically(Tiktok) was teens, lip-syncing and dancing. Clubhouse was tech vcs, talking shop. Instagram was artists and designers, sharing lifestyle photos.
If the medium has reached scaled (as TikTok has), there’s no way to slice it with a vertical because TikTok already has all that content, and other content you’ll like.
People who have an interest in large audiences (media folks and celebrities) will demand one audience, but they aren't necessarily the whole market. Many will be fine to be elsewhere. Even twitter didn't provide 'one audience' at its peak.
1. Why was HN founded, and;
2. Why did Reddit create the subreddit?
Unnecessary hint: Both questions have the same answer.
What? Ever heard anybody say "follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Youtube"? There are plenty more, all have a niche. Snapchat, Twitch, Tiktok, you name it. It's already a pluralistic world, and one more participant in the "open and free" niche is likely to have its place and fans.
I have around 80 followers in the Fediverse. (I have a “locked” profile which means I manually approve follow requests, mostly to keep trolls and bots away.) That’s not a very impressive number. It still is quite enough though‚ I don’t complain about the current level of interaction. Quality beats quantity.
Unlike Facebook, none of my relatives or middle school buddies are there – and to me that’s a good thing. To me, Facebook is way too large-scale for posting casual status updates.
for example, i'm not on tiktok but i still see tiktok content everyday on twitter, instagram, and reddit. and sometimes the news.
Is this the demand of the market, or the demand of the marketer? And in either case, why should the rest of us care? After seeing their work, I have a rather negative view of their decisions.
I use mastodon at the moment and I get value from it. It was network effects that brought me there - at the same time I wanted to join it, a bunch of people I was following elsewhere also moved there.
A "market" seems to be happy with Mastodon, as evidenced by a non-trivial amount of people using it.
Personally I think that whole aspect of social media is toxic so I don't care, but others are not going to agree. I'm happy with an enclave where I hear the people I want to hear and am not hit with a bunch of spam and propaganda.
* Generative AI's gift to human intellectual and cultural rebirth will actually be due to its motivating the birth of numerous curated spaces of discourse and interaction, with strict AI content policies. I predict there will be a cambrian explosion of these boutique spaces. And society 2.0 will emerge from this.
Then came the monolithic social networks, and we collectively changed from the weird and wondrous adventure mode into the TV-dinner that is the web nowadays. Neither is perfect, and I'm not sure at all how to have both. But I'm glad the pendulum is swinging a tiny bit back.
Mastodon is the most popular implementation currently, but there are many other implementations in the fediverse
But I agree, a better headline would be "Mastodon is Doomed as a Twitter replacement". It's fine for Mastodon to not want to be that. But at the same time a lot of recent arrivals were perfectly happy on Twitter and have only moved because of Musk's shenanigans. So long term they'll probably jump ship if a viable alternative comes along.
Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running a large instance. I know people running their own instances, with less than 10 users, yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances. They aren't missing out on something that I, on one of the largest instances, have.
I have two separate identities on 2 instances. One has only 40 members, on which I am a moderator, which is a subset of a forum's community and both being funded with donation and a yearly fee to be allowed to post ads in the local marketplace. The other one is much larger but runs on a single Hetzner VPS and is also funded with donation. Admin recently switched registration to manual approval, probably to control and limit the amount of accounts.
If I ever have to run my own fediverse/activity pub server/community, I would definitely put a limit on the active accounts I would serve and have an housekeeping rule to clean up inactive profiles.
If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a short time, you have a spam bot and not a user.
The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following people on your own instance, then people whose content is boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.
The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances
I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server
There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised
So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is
As an admin: no thanks.
Your statement is a hint to the problem.
From what I find on the Internet, you can still communicate/follow people on other servers without getting their timelines. It's just that the default setting is to pull everything from those relays and you need to disable it.
With that setting, you'll get everything people you follow on other instances, but not more. The "Federated timeline" tab will remain empty.
I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first place. They are made as a network for the users, not for selling ads. They can make every decision with the users wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll find a lot of success)
Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell.
[1] not only mastodon.social, also others like mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with your instance maintainer :)
There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.
Just because you're not on them doesn't mean they don't exist.
I wouldn't namedrop the ones I like here because I like them the way they are, but consider: there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities.
They're not trying to become hypermassive cash engines, but that's okay and even good. That's a grim way to exist.
Slack has a free tier too.
90-days of history only, is as much a feature as it is a bug. Idle "off-the record" talk with current and/or ex colleagues in a bar after work isn't recorded indefinitely, why should the online equivalent?
I'll take suggestions for a better (easy, cheap or free, functional, familiar) small community platform?
And Mastodon in particular will let you follow people on whatever instance you happen to use. "Checking 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people" is hyperbole, not reality.
Yes. And while the GP was hyberbolic, I think what we saw is that a large %age of people preferred one stop shopping.
Speaking for myself, the thing I love(d) the most about Twitter was the consolidation. It effectively replaced a bunch of message boards, online sites, and other things I would check throughout the day. One site gave me banter with friends, talking shop with professional acquaintances, weather, news, gossip, etc.
Facebook has long provided a user-friendly interface for non-geek users. It's filled with non-geeks generating content.
While the Internet has always had a geek contingent it hasn't been the exclusive domain of geeks for nearly thirty years.
It's quite normal.
Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site which covers probably a small proportion of your social circle.
The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend and family are on, is really something that started in the 2020'.
In many way, Mastodon is just the phpBB of the 2020', with the added benefit that you could connect to other phpBB instances.
And even though hosting your own phpBB instance or IRC/TeamSpeak/Mumble server kinda fell out of favor due to Reddit and Discord, they also kind of act in the same way. Sure you have one login to access all the community instead of having to have a separate account for each, but each community are their own bubble and can moderate however they like. It is not a "worlwide forum" like twitter or instagram.
With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks that actually brought the vast majority of people to the internet at all.
It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at the time.
I was never a heavy IRC user, but yeah back in the 00s, especially the earlier two-thirds, I had several different forums on my browser hotbar that I’d make the rounds through a couple of times each day.
Kind of miss that honestly, each forum was its own unique beast with an entirely different set of personalities without also being polarized. Contrast that to modern social networks which have a samey grey-paste quality unless one seeks out highly polarized services, which are often too caustic to spend time in without risking becoming similarly caustic yourself.
I would disagree with the timing here. I think the peak "everyone on one network" was Facebook in the early 2010's and since then the market has splintered to other social networks, sometimes along generational lines, others based on use case.
That's why social networks seem so magical early on, not only is everyone you like maybe on them, but there will be new people in the next week, month, or year that you'll like too. New things and new ideas are possible. But at some point, this turns sour. Eternal September describes that phenomenon, I think, but doesn't explain it well.
In some unfortunate networks, I think the latter can come even before the former (preempting it, making it impossible). You don't ever get the golden age.
Mastadon looks alot like this. Ignoring the politics, it looks alot like Voat did, and all the "we didn't learn the lessons of Voat" reddit alternatives that came after. It's almost as if you can't build a social network as a refugee tent city and make anything that anyone wants. Maybe that's the problem. In such a place where everyone is fleeing, there is nothing new there. It's all the same old people who were at the last place with you, there is nothing new about it.
(I shudder in horror to think what email would look like if it was invented today by some Silicon Valley techbro startup - interoperability somehow isn't even considered as an option anymore)
The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.
Twitter, that we all love to talk about, has only a very small penetration with around 200 millions of active users.
And there are still myriads of tiny web forums with very active communities. I don't think every social network needs to have a global penetration.
Then why do we have Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Orkut, Whatsapp, Instagram, SnapChat, QQ, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and Stackoverflow?
What you say people don't want, is exactly what people already do.
If anything, activitypub fixes this. The whole idea of the protocol is interoperability: that you need only one app to check all of them. Whether they are 5 twitter clones talking AP, or a Linkedin, youtube, meetup, and twitter-alike talking AP: all are interoperable, and you can interact with all of them from just one account and app.
I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the point of an online community for me.
So having different groups for different purposes is precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.
literally posting this to the HN audience...
Says the post on a thriving discussion forum that isn't even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.
And there's absolutely no reason for any of these networks to cross paths. The idea that everyone needs to be in one network, is just as logical as my mother reading my HN comments.
You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.
How does Mastodon prevent itself from becoming email? I'm unfamiliar with the design. Do you simply turtle your trust with other servers?
One of the interesting things I haven't seen with advanced AI is the antispam AI. I would love to have a semi-trustable service that reviewed incoming numbers/messages and evaluated them against expert level manipulation, propaganda, advertising, and con techniques. Of course that then provides access to the agent ...
You'd THINK facebook and google have advanced AI language models for these given ChatGPT's abilities, but I've never seen or heard anything like that. Then again, that would be customer focused, and google and facebook are now more spam/con than pro-consumer utility.
Ha, if ChatGPT is REALLY converging to the point of coding actual systems (1-2 years maybe???), then I would like to weaponize it to counter the api drift defense used by the social media walled gardens.
No one has been able to truly integrate your social media content across the walls. Because no integration stands the constant drift of api interface. BUT, if chatgpt can constantly adapt to the changes, you might be able to do it.
Consider that while the walled gardens can shift their APIs to some degree, they can't shift them REALLY fast, because their "actual" partners need some stability. So I might be able to AI adapt-scrape from my sources and centralize better.
I don't think that is within ChatGPT's current abilities, but I don't think it is that far.
"Turtling" : a defensive, cautious approach to expansion in RTS and 4X games, rather than reckless expansion and "mixing it up". In this context, you carefully whitelist nodes conservatively, but you'll miss a lot of content and people.
Not sure what turtle means in this case, but spam is currently less of a problem on mastodon (mastodon.world is the instance I'm using) than on twitter. When the admins actually care, they can solve it.
It wasn't always that way, but it nearly always ends up that way. Reason being the Internet makes it extremely easy to discover new services, and switching costs are relatively low. So this leads to the "winner take all (or nearly all)" dynamics that are so prevalent on the web - a service only needs to be slightly better than it's competitors to win.
People talk about the concentration of big Internet projects and companies as if it were imposed from on high. The exact opposite happened: people flocked to the services they found to be the best, and told their friends about them.
I think what you are pointing to is how network effects suck up customers the first time when there's basically no competition doing the same thing. E.g. Facebook was doing something much, much better than myspace, and people flocked. But after that, switching costs became very high because of how entrenched people were on FB. It took an entire generation for that effect to atrophy, and this is unlikely because there were better alternatives, and more likely because of sociodynamics.
Now it's TikTok and Twitter and people are having a very tough time figuring out how to get out of those platforms even when they sorta hate them. High switching costs because of network effects.
Doesn't matter if there's a slightly better product. There needs to be either a massively better product or the existing products need to be seen as culturally undesirable (e.g. Facebook is cringe).
Which I think is a good thing, and it's also how it was before, on the BBS/Forums days.
Did you read the article? It's right there in the end:
>Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users. I’m greatful for the admins that have dedicated so much of their time running instances, and thank you to the admins who shared their instance financial information.
>If you love Mastodon I’m happy for you. The internet needs bold bets and people to invest in them.