Introduction
For over a decade, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Instagram have dominated our lives. Their stranglehold on the internet seemed insurmountable. However, due to a variety of recent events that stranglehold looks like it might finally be broken.
There are, of course, a number of competing platforms (and protocols) looking to bring users onboard – Bluesky with the AT protocol and Mastodon with Activity Pub being the most notable – but users have been slow to adopt these. Any early Bluesky user will be able to tell you how many unused invites they accrued. In part the objection is based on the platforms not meeting all the user’s needs, because they’re too complex, too empty or don’t offer all the functionality they expect. But the greater issue is that people are sick of having so many apps that fall under the umbrella of ‘social media’. And who can blame them? There was already a ‘siloing’ of people across a range of platforms, and as people move away from the dominant ones, and that siloing has only got worse.
It seems like the situation is hopeless; that we’re destined to see once-thriving communities fractured and atomised into discrete messaging groups on platforms like Discord. But it doesn’t have to be. And the first step in avoiding that future requires an understanding of how these platforms became so dominant in the first place.
The Early Web
We tend to talk about ‘social media’ and the ‘social web’ as having arrived some time in the early 2000s, with the rise of websites like Friendster, MySpace, and later Facebook. This makes sense when discussing the mass-adoption of these things, because for the vast majority of people using the internet back then, it largely was a static platform for information-finding. But this wasn’t the limit of the web, even in the earliest days,
From its inception the web was social and interactive – from people using forums and chatrooms, to messenger clients, online community groups and personal websites – the main difference with the ‘social web’ was that these interactions were usually with strangers, and required some minor technical skill to achieve – at a minimum setting up accounts on each new site you wanted to interact on – whereas Myspace, Facebook and the like could facilitate interaction at the push of a button.
One of the other main features of the early web – particularly as less-technical users began to find their way online – were web portals. Although the definition has become a little fuzzier over the years - and now includes the front page of any large collection of websites - in the context I’m using here, it referred to the landing pages users were offered, mainly through ISPs and search engines, that provided their ‘gateway’ to the web. These platforms, which eventually became tailored to each user through services such as iGoogle, provided feeds from news websites, weather updates, a search bar and other basic tools to make the internet ‘friendlier’.
The Social Media ‘Revolution’
As with a lot of ‘disruptive’ tech, most of the innovation in social media was simply replicating things that came before in a simplified way, making it ‘easier’ for non-technical users, but less functional for everyone else. Even the ability to readily connect with existing friends was offered by MSN Messenger, Yahoo Groups and MSN Communities. The truly revolutionary thing social media sites did was to provide an easy method of keeping that connection constant by pushing status updates into news feeds.
Arguably the ‘hook’ driving people to social media wasn’t what they did, but how they made these things more convenient, and made the vast and open internet more ‘manageable’ by locking most of it outside of a ‘walled garden’.
Beyond this, Myspace and Friendster offered people a way to not only publish their thoughts, but also to find an audience, without the effort of building a site and publicising it. Facebook let people stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues, Twitter gave a direct line to famous people, Instagram made photo sharing simple – and after the false starts of Vine and Snapchat – TikTok did the same for short videos.
Although this is an oversimplification, I think it is fair to say that successful platforms have offered something that users haven’t had access to before, and offered it in a way that even users with limited skill find easy to use. Beyond this, though, there is one other thing that social media offers users. Particularly those who are less tech-savvy: a web portal.
This is particularly obvious with Facebook, which essentially functions in the same way as the old AOL, Yahoo or iGoogle homepages did – and largely for the same audience. But it’s even true of sites like Instagram and Tiktok, where brands pump information into newsfeeds in the same way that an RSS feed of website updates used to sit in the corner of a homepage.
The Migration Problem
For at least the last five years – if not longer – the popular social media platforms have been getting worse. What started with the imposition of recommended feeds, regulated by an opaque algorithm, has become a barrage of unrequested, and unwanted content – much of which is hateful and offensive – while posts by actual friends rarely, if ever, appear in feeds. Any sort of efforts made by users to mitigate this is undone by the algorithm – either by accident or by design – and often sitewide terms of service are ignored to benefit certain users, at the expense of everyone else.
Beyond this, these sites regularly violate reasonable expectations of privacy, and generally act in ways that are at best annoying to, and often downright harmful to, their users. The chorus of complaints bey regular users, particularly the most active ones, is near constant, and yet in spite of this, most users stay put. The cost of leaving a platform – losing friends, and reestablishing a network elsewhere – is too high. And as stated before, no one wants to add yet another social media network to the mix.
Protocols
In response to the degradation in established social media platforms, a number of organisations have attempted to develop alternatives. Thus far these have mostly been clones of Twitter, but while the platforms themselves aren’t particularly interesting, the technology behind them is: Open-source protocols.
These protocols – the two most successful ones being AT Protocol and ActivityPub - are the building blocks of social networks rather than the networks themselves, and can be adapted to recreate twitter, or facebook, or more or less any existing network. They also allow users to self-host, to port accounts across different network providers.
Similarly, older protocols such as RSS and Atom allow for sites to push updates to users without the need to post on social media. Indeed almost every function of sites like Facebook – including defunct features – can now be replicated with open source technology.
The Future
It’s now absolutely possible to recreate Facebook. Or Instagram, or Twitter using open source software. Anyone – or any group of people – can theoretically spin up a self-hosted version of these sites and run an ‘Instagram for nudists’, or a ‘Facebook for anime fanatics’, or ‘TikTok for left-handed gardeners’, and as long as they find a hosting company that will support their content and cope with the traffic – everyone gets what they want.
Except all this does is lead to more fracturing, more siloing, and a more entrenched userbase on the existing platforms. The clone sites are great as a proof of concept, but they’re not the future of social networking, and they never will be.
Social media works best when a large audience is on one platform, allowing users to reach far-beyond their immediate circle. It’s the most rewarding version for users and for site owners. The siloing of userbases leads to extra work for users – cross-posting on multiple platforms – and limited reach.
And while there are benefits to multiple protocols, maintained by different organisations, their lack of interoperability leaves users with two bad choices: be on apps that cover both and cross-post, or miss out on connections with friends and potential followers. Instead of looking to a terrible present, we should look to the past. Those old web portals, rendered defunct by Facebook give us an indication of where social media could, should, and really must go.
The Idea
Open Social Directory:
The hook of this idea is an address book. Or rather a user directory. As communities have migrated from one platform to another, friendships and connections have been lost – rekindling them elsewhere is difficult. Particularly when usernames change across platforms, and searching for friends and many of the native search tools on social media sites don’t help here.
Obviously this comes with enormous privacy concerns – from data mining to personal security – as well as potential GDPR compliance issues. Although I don’t have all the answers here, the simplest way to allay many of these concerns would be to only respond to user queries with the usernames from open social platforms. This may also allow us to store the majority of query data – e-mail addresses, ‘real’ names, phone numbers and the like, in a hashed format as we would have no need to retrieve that original data.
When users ‘match’, we could store the connection between them so that each user is updated with any additional open social IDs added by one another. We could also make this connection severable by either user.
Even without any other functionality, this is a useful service that would be of benefit to people, but currently doesn’t seem to exist.
Unified Feed:
As discussed above, there’s currently a proliferation of protocols, and a proliferation of apps based on those protocols, many of which are intended to mimic the functionality of existing social media apps.
In many ways this is replicating the existing social media landscape, where users switch between different apps to find different information, and discrete communities. An experience born out of competition between social media companies, rather than for any benefit for users.
One of the main advantages of open social media is that this no longer has to be the case, and that users can have one app to post across all their accounts, and one feed of information from everyone they’re following.
This, then, is the other ‘hook’ to our idea. A single platform from which to conduct activity on open social media. This, though, isn’t quite enough to be of use to people who haven’t already dived deep into services like Bluesky or Mastodon. There’s no point in signing up for a service that simplifies platforms you’re not using. Instead this platform needs to take heed of what made social media sites popular, and the old Web Portals before them, and make the open web easy, comfortable and familiar.
One element of this would be integrating RSS and Atom feeds into a user’s social feed, and ideally using AT Protocol and Activity Pub to facilitate commenting on those feeds – viewable to friends and followers. Similarly, other services from the days of Web Portals might be useful here – website recommendations, shopping links and the like. A lot of these things seem old fashioned and pointlessly retro, but for the sort of low-technical skill users who are only comfortable in walled gardens, they still serve a purpose.
Most importantly, though, would be packaging the open technologies that have existed on the web since its inception, into a format that can be easily used by people whose only interaction with the internet has been through walled-garden social media, and apps. This could include creation and hosting of homepages, galleries, and portfolios, groups, forums, chatrooms and webrings. By offering users templates for these things, all built around off the shelf templates that would make getting updates from these sites into user feeds simpler.
There are similar opportunities with RSVP systems and online calendars, potentially offering people an open source alternative to Google calendar or a replacement for Facebook’s formerly useful, but now limited event calendar facility. Particularly as there are already existing RSVP services available through the AT Protocol.
If this looks like reinventing web 1.0 in exactly the same way that MySpace, Facebook and the like did, that’s because it is. But this isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. The main reason people didn’t adopt the tools we’ve had available for so long, and why they still fail to do is, is precisely because they’re complicated, costly and hard to use. The appeal of social media – at least the earliest forms – was that it removed those barriers.
Even those of us with technical skills don’t have the time or energy to create, maintain and market websites that function in this way. And those technical skills have become less common in the ‘app era’ where most interaction with computers is done in a simplified way.
Connecting the Two:
The advantage of building a service that links other protocols is that we don’t have to rely on the popularity of our service for it to be useful. However, as the userbase grows, we could potentially use the information about connections in our directory service to help create and curate feeds, as well as recommend websites, groups and the like, helping boost their visibility.
If we do this it will have to be done in a transparent way, and one that is in line with user expectations – otherwise we’ll fall into the same traps as the current wave of social media - but this could potentially be a way to help build out networks without sacrificing privacy.
Looking to the Future:
Beyond the services outlined above, there are opportunities to develop services that offer classified advert and marketplace/online shopping functionality – either directly on a user-to-user basis, or acting as a third party. One of the biggest failings of existing social media is that when they have run similar services they have given the illusion of trust between buyers and sellers, without having enough repercussions for people who post fraudulent listings. This could be rectified with public transaction history, and reviews. We could also use out directory information to ensure listings are only shown within extended networks.
Arguably this is just a starting point. As the userbase grows there are almost endless opportunities to adapt open source tech in ways that make it easier for users with limited technical skill to interact with.
Revenue Generation
While the primary aim of this project is to create a useful and beneficial social media platform, that can’t be stolen by billionaires, or corralled into openly supporting fascism, it would be hopelessly naïve to believe that it could survive on goodwill alone. Similarly, as the goal is public benefit, using open source tech, it’s unlikely to attract vast sums of venture capital.
As such, we need to ensure this is financially self-supporting rapidly. Fortunately a lot of the things we’re ‘reinventing’ have paved the way here. Techniques like in-feed advertising and web hosting resale could potentially offer enough to cover most of the operating costs, although as the service develops we may well discover more effective techniques that are less intrusive to users.
Making This Happen
I am not a tech person. Nor am I a finance person. I’m an administrator in the film industry. As such, I have neither the technical skill, nor the contacts, to be able to make this happen. One might also reasonably conclude that this lack of contacts and connection also means that I’ve been talking nonsense for the last 2,500 words. Although I would hope if you’ve made it this far, you don’t.
However if anyone does have the skills and resources, please get in touch. I’ll do my best to use my one relevant skill – project co-ordination – to help make it happen. Or don’t. Because I’m more not going to be upset if someone else makes it exist, just as long as it exists.
