I still think we haven’t seen the “what’s next” in social. I think all these completing protocols are barking up the right tree but they seem to be a bridge to the next thing, not the next thing in and of itself.
i still can't ping my friend and say 'hey check out this thing im watching on my screen right now', unless we're all on exactly the same ecosystems, and i send the correct link, and we're all logged in, and the engineer that day remembered to put the right meta headers in, and our credit cards haven't expired...
Interesting, maybe a system to send content to a friend instantly via text message is a product in its own right. I guess you mean a private link though?
The technical side of it is a solved problem. Everything you look at is hosted on a web page. You get a URL that points to it. You send the URL to another person and they can reach it, maybe with some additional stuff for time-stamping and chapter breaks and such. For bonus stuff you can include some account management for each user to be able to interact with the content but it’s not necessary and doesn’t need to gate you just being able to watch the thing.
The problem emerges when companies need to monetize the hosting and delivery of the content. It’s 100% a business model challenge, not a technical one.
yup my current most common method of 'socializing' digitally is me taking a screenshot of something interesting on my screen and sending it over some chat service (depending on who i am sending it to)
if i could open a screen share session with a similar easy shortcut, and broadcast whatever i have open on my screen with my friends, regardless of where the pixels originated, with a full duplex link i could talk over / see my friends with, i think i'd have much more meaningful evenings
i can't even get discord working for what its supposed to be good at: chatting with one friend while we play a multiplayer game together
"can you hear me? I can hear you but not the game? ok now i can hear the game but not you? ok now i can hear the game bleeding through your mic? did you set up a virtual audio cable? is your mic patched through correctly?" every single time.
sometimes i just want to scroll reddit with friends, or watch a part of a dvd with friends, or play pubg mobile with friends, but i dont want to break out a display splitter and ask them to log in to a centralized service and accept an endless barrage of cookie banners and "Do you accept our new terms?" checkboxes and watch ads just to watch some memes with me (after i spend 30 minutes figuring out how their API changed so i can keep streaming the way i figured out how to already do it without issues just last week)
why cant i just send my pixels to my friends via bittorrent or some other protocol
it definitely used to be easier, i have a distinct memory of us being able to stream No Man's Sky around launch day to each other with sound mixing being handled automagically by discord with no hassle (we wanted to see if we could see each other if we stood at the same place at the same time (we couldn't))
teamspeak and mumble were definitely easier to start up and use once you get up and running the first time, i think i remember having to either install drivers or something else to get stuff like global push-to-speak and other core features to work
Federation is the future because politics demands it. As more and more social media platform turn into an intelligence gathering and an information warfare tool, countries around the world will make stricter laws to restrict the current American and Chinese owned BigTech moats of social media platform. We are already seeing this with new data privacy laws or stringent restriction or even outright banning of the platform (as China has done). This is a huge headache for American and Chinese government because such restrictions impairs their current online intelligence programs. The obvious solution is to partly sacrifice the profits of the BigTech to keep the data flowing. We'll soon find inter-operability being forced on platforms (like iMessage or WhatsApp). More "open" protocols will be pushed and standardised slowly to make it difficult to impose political restrictions and weaken privacy laws (because the message will be that BigTech are no longer in control, but "the people" and every government wants to spy on its citizens). Just look at email to realise how these things eventually end up - how many of you run your own email servers, and successfully ensure that your mails aren't bocked by "spam" services? Federation is good and necessary. But we are now decades past from the idea of "controlling our data".
I actually think it's exactly politics that will make federation impossible, with the exception of a few big players who have the deep pockets to fund major moderation. For those people (big tech), you're right interop will be mandatory.
There's no way government are going to give up the control they have with big tech and companies that can be regulated and served warrants and stuff. The last thing they want is for individual decentralized citizens to be able to stand up their own systems and discuss dangerous ideas[1] without oversight.
On top of that, big tech will be eager to push things like Web Environment Integrity[2] and Private Access Tokens[3] that can ensure that unapproved (or semi or fully anonymous) actors with dangerous operating systems like linux aren't allowed to participate, at least on a first-class level. It will be packaged as "anti-spam" or "a better user experience for our users" but the fact that it massively empowers the tech companies and enables them to further entrench you into their walled gardens will absolutely not be an opportunity they want to miss.
[1]: The definition of dangerous ideas will depend on who and which party is in power. Unless the corporate overlords end up in control, in which case it will be what their managers consider dangerous.
Federation solves nothing. The problem with the current generation of social media is quite simply the profit motive. Elon Musk tried to make a big deal out of being a free speech absolutist, but his company is run for profit and any time free speech butts up against profit, profit wins. Federation's only advantage is that the profiteers haven't invaded that space yet, but Bluesky is loudly telegraphing that it will no longer be a safe space and they intend to start monetizing it.
If you want to a shining example of effective content moderation, public utility and centralization, then just look at Wikipedia. What's different about them? Non-profit.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
I honestly hope so. Having organizations like Meta or Twitter et al control massive sections of the social media landscape is not healthy. Any organization, group, or individual that wants to have an online presence should be able to spin up their own service and publish to any constellation of servers that want to hear what they have to say. I hope the EU efforts to push common standards are also applied to US companies in US markets to make all of the coms services federate like we were promised over a decade ago.
isn't better to have legal regulations on big servers? as i can see some abuse from hosts (that entered early it the game) & now hold multi-thousand users instance...
Who do you think writes the regulations in the US? The lobbyists. They are written mostly with the intent of creating regulatory capture and making life difficult for smaller players.
why not both? i recognize that large decentralized networks create some challenges, but imo that's still preferable to giving a small number of large (even heavily regulated) operators total control over the network.
Personally I don't think this is particularly exciting. Buy in from major social media entities at this stage is fine, but what matters, in my opinion, is the overall growth of the network outside of these incumbent social networking giants. I appreciate that they appear to be playing ball, but if the fediverse is successful on a scale that matters this will be a minor footnote.
No doubt that the existing major networks would prefer to be able to enclose the budding commons that the fediverse is starting to create, but I'm hopeful that people will choose community and/or locally operated alternatives rather than continue buying into the mega corporate offerings.
I'd like to see them actually make it so the common person can understand federation and see it as a plus rather than a confusing onboarding roadblock.
They won't, because federation doesn't actually solve any of the problems the average social media user has, while introducing its own, (sometimes very hard/impossible) problems.
The main driver behind current social media's shittiness is the user-hostile business model that means the incentives of the user and the platform are opposed.
Federation doesn't actually address any of this, and currently the federated social media world "runs" on effectively charity. "Runs" in quotes because we've already seen instance shutdowns which caused a fair bit of trouble. It only currently "runs" because the scale is small enough that it can indeed be sustained by charitable efforts, and hasn't devolved into a unusable spam-fest because it's too small to actually be worth spamming.
If your "solution" to social media shittiness is effectively turn it into something ran by charities, that's fine but you can achieve this much easier (and more efficiently) by just having one charity run one centralized service with an open API (since the business incentives around lock-in are no longer applicable).
Back in jr high school we had halo modding forums that were hosted on free hosts until we had someone with money to pay for a server, until that ran out and we moved again.
Some of those communities might go on and last a while and accumulate knowledge.
Ah maybe not, sounds like a path the gamergate stuff. But the concept certainly feels nostalgic.
And besides now I have a job and a small amount of extra cash to pay for a small community website.
Would be nice to have federated reddits instead of reddit.
There's some pattern of creating those sorts of environments.
Maybe it's the opposite, a community like reddit if You're banned or maybe shamed or even down voted for an ignorant take, not even a bad faith argument, maybe that user stays on Reddit but joins a different subreddit that new subreddit may be more likely to indulge in that viewpoint, maybe even sarcastically.
While on small websites I think a user in that case might just be dissuaded from engaging in the community outright.
I don't believe gamergate to be a special thing, just oxygen, fuel, and a spark.
The reason forums lost out to Reddit and centralized social media is because the latter is more convenient. Turns out having to register an account on every single forum and have to prove your worth every time is less convenient that having a single account and a proof of trustworthiness (as in if you haven’t spammed/misbehaved elsewhere, chances are you won’t misbehave here either) following you around.
I'd say it's more of a failure of certain search engines, among other things.
Personally I've found reddit karma to be correlated with the obnoxiousness of the
user, not the inverse. There's plenty out there who feel the same. Even with that point aside, what is there to prove? I don't understand the assertion. Wrongthink will get you censored on Reddit faster than anywhere else regardless of how much karma you had.
Even good posts on Reddit get shuffled past the first pages after a few days. There's too much negative incentive to put effort into content when it can get censored, downvoted, or buried. Sure, you might potentially reach more users in the right circumstances, but many of those users are addicted to notifications and doomscrolling, not enthusiasts of the subject matter. Plenty of that here on HN as well (more on the side of trend-chasing, manufactured two-minute hate about climate or national news, while rarely challenging the status quo) but it's at least tolerable, and I know the moderation is fair here.
Forums haven't "lost out" when they can still serve to bring people together who have, or want to read unpopular opinions. I could go on about use cases. If there were none, there would be no forums.
The takeaway here is that Reddit can be and is considered by a decent proportion to be a dystopian failure, not a "convenience". A black hole of siphoned search traffic that regurgitates a watered down and sanitized imitation of something resembling a community.
Ignoring all the publication of content bits, I always felt like what the internet really needed to improve portability of accounts and data was just a federated user authentication standard.
Maybe working in secuirty has screwed my vision because this stuff bounces around in my head all day.
I think social media as we know it today is already at the end of the road. Our data has been obtained to make generative AI products and now we are entering a new phase of the internet. The social media we have has already been poisoned by assholes trying to make everyone addicted for money, or victims of non-kinetic warfare.
There is going to be way to many self-managing sock puppets all with an agenda. Automated psyops agents left to their devices, all talking to each other and you.
That’s not to say there won’t be sociable media, it’s just that regardless of how federated anything is we are all still going to constantly be in contact with AI.
the next big social media platform will be the one that can guarantee the most authentic human connections.
Until we get to that point, we will have what we have not and watch it get worse as smaller federated instances pop up that become selective or invite only.
isn't it possible to avoid all the problems by simply using these tools in a certain way?
i am on whatsapp, wechat, telegram, matrix, signal, sms, irc, email, even discord...
on each of these services i am mostly in contact with real humans that i met in person.
i am in a few groups mostly made out of these same people, but also some groups where i never met anyone. i am not on facebook, mastodon or ex-twitter or any service that tries to feed me with stuff instead of just giving me a timeline of all messages shared. even on youtube i follow the channels of my choice and mostly ignore recommendations except to discover other interesting channels.
i don't see any of that going away. therefore i don't see anything changing for me
It would be useful to categorise "social media" into "publish to strangers" vs "interact with individuals in private". Apparently these are both social media, but they are very different use-cases.
Most of the apps you mentioned are focussed on that second category, whereas (I believe) the GP was talking about the first category.
well, at least whatsapp, wechat, youtube and even telegram are trying to get into the first category. i ignore the respective features. in my case i eventually realized that i would waste to much time if i would try to follow all the posts pushed there, and it would also take to much effort to curate that content, so i decided to completely ignore it instead. but i am old, and my life experience helps me to stick to this. for young people this must be harder.
i agree that this distinction is important, but i am afraid it is a lost battle, and as we criticize the negative effects of the first category of social media we need to also point out how social media can be useful when it is in the second category.
I actually think this could be an incorrect assumption we're making that humans want authentic human connections on social media. Most humans on social media are not their authentic selves and want to project an image of who they think people want to engage with.
> the next big social media platform will be the one that can guarantee the most authentic human connections.
Which is a thing that I don't think is feasible. I could be wrong, of course. But I do agree that authenticity is going to be the issue that social platforms will live or die on.
I think the next evolution of "social media" is more likely to be a return to the old-fashioned notion of interacting with people in person.
The only way it's feasible is really requiring an ID or credit card to sign up. Technically, it's pretty doable, but I doubt the users would be willing to go that far for authenticity.
> I doubt the users would be willing to go that far for authenticity.
That's what I mean by it not being feasible. Technically, there are many, many ways to make this happen, but they all come with very serious problems that I don't think most people would accept.
On the other hand, people accept things now that just a short time ago were considered outrageous and unacceptable by the majority of people (in the US, anyway). I maintain hope that this descent will stop at some point, and that hope is likely coloring my expectations.
One method to "guarantee" authenticity is to charge for usage. It could even be a low cost, like $1/month or $10/year. That'd be enough to deter the absolute worst kind of people.
how about only following people that you met in person? i mean it doesn't even make sense to me to follow someone i don't know unless they actually produce interesting content. such as say viheart or nileblue or even mr beast if you must. is it possible that any of these could decide to sell out and start producing content using AI? sure. but will they be able to fool everyone?
the problem is a lack of ability to recognize worthwhile content, a lack of critical consumption. there is also be a problem to find good content among the mass of junk. but that's already a problem now. i have mostly given up. i find new content mostly through HN.
the problem will be that a lot of good content will remain undiscovered.
so let me make this claim in response: the next big social media platform will be the one that will make it easy to discover actually good content as opposed to popular content.
The current generation of generative AI models is quire far from perfect. They'll need more and more data. For bigger models, for models which are targeting specific areas, etc.
But is possible that social media as source is already poisoned by Gen AI postings.
I was wondering recently how much time I've spent arguing with bots online. Hours, surely. Dozens of hours? And it seems like it's going to get worse. The Reddit front page seems largely bot-run now. It's only a matter of time until it spreads.
If you could collate all these arguments and actually help you get better at debating then this could be turned into a positive where you shouldn't care about the person (AI or human) behind the argument but the argument itself.
I got banned from the most popular mastadon server for simply correcting a guy about an indian tribe that he got wrong so yea doesn’t feel much different than the centralized web to me.
If you don't control the url of your content (i.e. outsourcing it to a social network), you control nothing. All the other details of interface and interoperability can be worked out. If you can't redirect the traffic, you're out of luck.
Kept it up and operational and didn't make it immediately unpleasant or impossible to use during that time and allowed them to find a balance for moderation.
Their user count and revenue has dropped like a rock. Obviously other factors are at play, but what decisive evidence is there? Even anecdotally I have to admit that I’ve clicked on Twitter links that unexpectedly failed to load and decided to hit the back button instead of trying to reload several times.
I think the biggest issue with the decentralised crowd is they think their target market is their (technical) peers. Web publishing was a cul de sac until it went WYSIWYG. Dialup internet didn’t take off until the likes of AOL dumbed it down.
Until the decentralisation experience becomes AOL simple, it will remain a backwater.
The technical peers can start and create the masses worth joining the platform for. Your average non-technical Joe would never understand why would they swap their Facebook or Twitter for this. It would happen only when the technical folks would despise the platforms. We can help non-technical folks to join, when needed. I don’t see it as a huge obstacle for mass adoption in a long-term perspective.
For decentralization to take off, I can absolutely see a company pushing it as a user-first, privacy-forward social media solution. Basically turning your own home computer (or a $100 device you keep plugged in at home), that operates as your server. You set up your profile and use a plugin and add-on store to basically build your own social network. Then share usernames with friends and family. The data stays in your own house and is accessible to those you grant access to.
I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of decentralization yet, but I can totally see this being an angle companies to take. Especially as data privacy becomes even more important to people.
Freedombox[0] has been a thing for 14 years, there are plenty of solutions for hosting services for yourself as someone technical, but they're not compelling to nontechnical folks who will have a fax machine with no one to fax.
maybe it's a different story with activitypub and bluesky's AT protocol, but it's not as if decentralized social protocols are a new innovation, the market just isn't interested in "privacy" and "control" - those that do have already discovered they can get by without social media altogether
(I say this as someone building a self hosted home server/appliance, but I think i'll promise more of a fireproof safe - not for keeping secrets, but for making sure you don't lose essential documents / family photos, and a home assistant that doesn't shout "I CANT CONNECT TO THE WIFI" when I ask it to switch a lamp off)
I think the reason is because the technical is boring. It's gotta get wrapped up in pretty plug-and-play hardware, customization-forward (social feed that you design!), private (your data is stored right in your home!), etc.
I think it could be aimed well at something like the livestreaming/Twitch/YT community, and build out from that base.
Thanks for sharing Freedombox too, I've never heard of them before.
So, I think Bluesky has it wrong and the Mastodon model is still better (theoretically, of course, I have no idea how to make this more popular) ; which is to say -- there are no huge advantages and probably tons of pitfalls when you try to do "one universal identifier that sticks forever" for people.
We already have a better working model for this; it's HOW WE DO EMAIL. On one hand, email is a very strong "centralized identity" thing, and on the other it's not absolute. Yes, it has problems, but as twitter has shown -- deeply centralizing the thing has MORE problems.
The core problem with Mastodon and AT Protocol is that they are just codifying the user experience of Twitter and therefore locking in that design. We need to be exploring the space of what is possible in social media, not doubling down on a known broken design. Twitter was not particularly popular compared to other social media apps, and the core design has a ton of problems.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThe problem emerges when companies need to monetize the hosting and delivery of the content. It’s 100% a business model challenge, not a technical one.
if i could open a screen share session with a similar easy shortcut, and broadcast whatever i have open on my screen with my friends, regardless of where the pixels originated, with a full duplex link i could talk over / see my friends with, i think i'd have much more meaningful evenings
"can you hear me? I can hear you but not the game? ok now i can hear the game but not you? ok now i can hear the game bleeding through your mic? did you set up a virtual audio cable? is your mic patched through correctly?" every single time.
sometimes i just want to scroll reddit with friends, or watch a part of a dvd with friends, or play pubg mobile with friends, but i dont want to break out a display splitter and ask them to log in to a centralized service and accept an endless barrage of cookie banners and "Do you accept our new terms?" checkboxes and watch ads just to watch some memes with me (after i spend 30 minutes figuring out how their API changed so i can keep streaming the way i figured out how to already do it without issues just last week)
why cant i just send my pixels to my friends via bittorrent or some other protocol
Back in the day Teamspeak or mumble were hassle free.
teamspeak and mumble were definitely easier to start up and use once you get up and running the first time, i think i remember having to either install drivers or something else to get stuff like global push-to-speak and other core features to work
In my experience, Discord is no more or less buggy than Teamspeak or Mumble
There's no way government are going to give up the control they have with big tech and companies that can be regulated and served warrants and stuff. The last thing they want is for individual decentralized citizens to be able to stand up their own systems and discuss dangerous ideas[1] without oversight.
On top of that, big tech will be eager to push things like Web Environment Integrity[2] and Private Access Tokens[3] that can ensure that unapproved (or semi or fully anonymous) actors with dangerous operating systems like linux aren't allowed to participate, at least on a first-class level. It will be packaged as "anti-spam" or "a better user experience for our users" but the fact that it massively empowers the tech companies and enables them to further entrench you into their walled gardens will absolutely not be an opportunity they want to miss.
[1]: The definition of dangerous ideas will depend on who and which party is in power. Unless the corporate overlords end up in control, in which case it will be what their managers consider dangerous.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
[3]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
If you want to a shining example of effective content moderation, public utility and centralization, then just look at Wikipedia. What's different about them? Non-profit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So today you can spin up your own Mastodon server and have anyone follow you from Threads and vice versa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Either way their intentions are pretty easy to understand.
ActivityPub integration keeps regulators off their back and allows external content to appear on Threads which they can then monetise alongside ads.
No doubt that the existing major networks would prefer to be able to enclose the budding commons that the fediverse is starting to create, but I'm hopeful that people will choose community and/or locally operated alternatives rather than continue buying into the mega corporate offerings.
The main driver behind current social media's shittiness is the user-hostile business model that means the incentives of the user and the platform are opposed.
Federation doesn't actually address any of this, and currently the federated social media world "runs" on effectively charity. "Runs" in quotes because we've already seen instance shutdowns which caused a fair bit of trouble. It only currently "runs" because the scale is small enough that it can indeed be sustained by charitable efforts, and hasn't devolved into a unusable spam-fest because it's too small to actually be worth spamming.
If your "solution" to social media shittiness is effectively turn it into something ran by charities, that's fine but you can achieve this much easier (and more efficiently) by just having one charity run one centralized service with an open API (since the business incentives around lock-in are no longer applicable).
Some of those communities might go on and last a while and accumulate knowledge.
Ah maybe not, sounds like a path the gamergate stuff. But the concept certainly feels nostalgic.
And besides now I have a job and a small amount of extra cash to pay for a small community website.
Would be nice to have federated reddits instead of reddit.
Maybe it's the opposite, a community like reddit if You're banned or maybe shamed or even down voted for an ignorant take, not even a bad faith argument, maybe that user stays on Reddit but joins a different subreddit that new subreddit may be more likely to indulge in that viewpoint, maybe even sarcastically.
While on small websites I think a user in that case might just be dissuaded from engaging in the community outright.
I don't believe gamergate to be a special thing, just oxygen, fuel, and a spark.
Personally I've found reddit karma to be correlated with the obnoxiousness of the user, not the inverse. There's plenty out there who feel the same. Even with that point aside, what is there to prove? I don't understand the assertion. Wrongthink will get you censored on Reddit faster than anywhere else regardless of how much karma you had.
Even good posts on Reddit get shuffled past the first pages after a few days. There's too much negative incentive to put effort into content when it can get censored, downvoted, or buried. Sure, you might potentially reach more users in the right circumstances, but many of those users are addicted to notifications and doomscrolling, not enthusiasts of the subject matter. Plenty of that here on HN as well (more on the side of trend-chasing, manufactured two-minute hate about climate or national news, while rarely challenging the status quo) but it's at least tolerable, and I know the moderation is fair here.
Forums haven't "lost out" when they can still serve to bring people together who have, or want to read unpopular opinions. I could go on about use cases. If there were none, there would be no forums.
The takeaway here is that Reddit can be and is considered by a decent proportion to be a dystopian failure, not a "convenience". A black hole of siphoned search traffic that regurgitates a watered down and sanitized imitation of something resembling a community.
Ignoring all the publication of content bits, I always felt like what the internet really needed to improve portability of accounts and data was just a federated user authentication standard.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/21/networking-traffic/thr...
I think social media as we know it today is already at the end of the road. Our data has been obtained to make generative AI products and now we are entering a new phase of the internet. The social media we have has already been poisoned by assholes trying to make everyone addicted for money, or victims of non-kinetic warfare.
There is going to be way to many self-managing sock puppets all with an agenda. Automated psyops agents left to their devices, all talking to each other and you.
That’s not to say there won’t be sociable media, it’s just that regardless of how federated anything is we are all still going to constantly be in contact with AI.
the next big social media platform will be the one that can guarantee the most authentic human connections.
Until we get to that point, we will have what we have not and watch it get worse as smaller federated instances pop up that become selective or invite only.
Not much different then private hidden services
i am on whatsapp, wechat, telegram, matrix, signal, sms, irc, email, even discord...
on each of these services i am mostly in contact with real humans that i met in person.
i am in a few groups mostly made out of these same people, but also some groups where i never met anyone. i am not on facebook, mastodon or ex-twitter or any service that tries to feed me with stuff instead of just giving me a timeline of all messages shared. even on youtube i follow the channels of my choice and mostly ignore recommendations except to discover other interesting channels.
i don't see any of that going away. therefore i don't see anything changing for me
Most of the apps you mentioned are focussed on that second category, whereas (I believe) the GP was talking about the first category.
i agree that this distinction is important, but i am afraid it is a lost battle, and as we criticize the negative effects of the first category of social media we need to also point out how social media can be useful when it is in the second category.
Which is a thing that I don't think is feasible. I could be wrong, of course. But I do agree that authenticity is going to be the issue that social platforms will live or die on.
I think the next evolution of "social media" is more likely to be a return to the old-fashioned notion of interacting with people in person.
But none of our personal experiences is a great indicator of what "most people" do.
84% of people aged 18 to 29 use at least one social media site.
That's what I mean by it not being feasible. Technically, there are many, many ways to make this happen, but they all come with very serious problems that I don't think most people would accept.
On the other hand, people accept things now that just a short time ago were considered outrageous and unacceptable by the majority of people (in the US, anyway). I maintain hope that this descent will stop at some point, and that hope is likely coloring my expectations.
the problem is a lack of ability to recognize worthwhile content, a lack of critical consumption. there is also be a problem to find good content among the mass of junk. but that's already a problem now. i have mostly given up. i find new content mostly through HN.
the problem will be that a lot of good content will remain undiscovered.
so let me make this claim in response: the next big social media platform will be the one that will make it easy to discover actually good content as opposed to popular content.
But is possible that social media as source is already poisoned by Gen AI postings.
Probably all of it?
Until the decentralisation experience becomes AOL simple, it will remain a backwater.
I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of decentralization yet, but I can totally see this being an angle companies to take. Especially as data privacy becomes even more important to people.
maybe it's a different story with activitypub and bluesky's AT protocol, but it's not as if decentralized social protocols are a new innovation, the market just isn't interested in "privacy" and "control" - those that do have already discovered they can get by without social media altogether
(I say this as someone building a self hosted home server/appliance, but I think i'll promise more of a fireproof safe - not for keeping secrets, but for making sure you don't lose essential documents / family photos, and a home assistant that doesn't shout "I CANT CONNECT TO THE WIFI" when I ask it to switch a lamp off)
[0] https://www.freedombox.org/
I think it could be aimed well at something like the livestreaming/Twitch/YT community, and build out from that base.
Thanks for sharing Freedombox too, I've never heard of them before.
We already have a better working model for this; it's HOW WE DO EMAIL. On one hand, email is a very strong "centralized identity" thing, and on the other it's not absolute. Yes, it has problems, but as twitter has shown -- deeply centralizing the thing has MORE problems.