2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse
2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what the open social web can be — and it’s already better than what we have.
It'll be interesting to see how the Fediverse moves forward without direct monetization.
We've seen Usenet become more of a niche platform because it's hard to monetize. Meanwhile, the popular social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) are dripping in ads, which make it easier for them to build and maintain developer teams.
I want the Fediverse to succeed, but I have a hard time seeing how it can compete for average users without paid developer hours.
2Money is possibly the biggest concern when it comes to running an instance - it can be difficult to sustain donations over time.
I know the Lemmy devs have, or at least did have, some grants that were helping keep them afloat, but they still rely on donations from users.
3The development of New Exciting Features™ will probably be slower on nonprofit systems, but the enormous costs of moderation will be effectively zero, while simultaneously improving in quality. My prediction for what we'll eventually see is "fun" ad-supported commercial platforms (assuming they can afford moderation), and a somewhat more "serious" discussion-based Fediverse.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook.
The infrastructure underlying all of this is typically ActivityPub, a decade-old protocol overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as the group more or less in charge of how the internet works).
(We really don’t need to get into the whole story of what happened to Twitter since then, except to say that the speed with which that platform changed made a lot of people acutely aware that we need a social ecosystem that can resist the whims of a single company or CEO.)
The simplicity is the point: since ActivityPub is not a product but a data format like PDF or JPG, what you do with those messages, those URLs, those inboxes and outboxes, is entirely up to you.
The most consistent argument against the long-term viability of platforms like Mastodon is that most people don’t give a hoot about the underlying protocols and infrastructure of their apps and just want things to be easy, reliable, and useful.
Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas.
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