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.
All very true.
Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.
Even now, I’m getting errors trying to comment.
I think the confusing sign up process and the clunky apps are going to scare a lot of people away. Additionally the nature of lemmy means you are more likely to have multiple fractured communities instead of just 1 central community per interest.
For example lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world all have their own communities for “technology.” If I want to subscribe to learn about technology updates do I need to subscribe to all of them? Do I just hope that the smaller ones shutdown and we’re only left with one?
Nothing weird about having multiple communities with the same or similar niche. On reddit there are thousands of cat subs. r/technology, r/tech, r/hardware are largely overlapping etc. You might subscribe to all the technology subs or you notice which ones you like better...
That’s true. But with a centralized platforrm like Reddit, that’s a O(N) problem. There are only N potential subreddit names. A user just needs to sort through the N names to find what they want.
With lemmy it’s an O(N^2) problem. There are N community names and each can belong to a lemmy instance, and there are potentially N lemmy instances. It’s literally a whole order of magnitude more confusing.
So with lemmy it’s mathematically more confusing. I don’t see how people don’t see this.
It might be mathematically more confusing but it's still not very confusing. A couple of communities will become bigger than others if that's important?
We used to (still do) have hundreds of forums roughly covering the same news and discussions and we were just fine, e.g. HardForum, AnandTech Forums, Overclockers etc.