Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?

So, it's been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media - and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet - the EU's are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity. Twitter has been taken over by the equivalent of a stoned ChatGPT (very confident, but very wrong) and seems to be rapidly driving the company off a cliff. Turns out maybe we didn't need antitrust reform: we just needed two obscenely rich tech CEOs to be totally out of touch with humanity.

Of course, into the void, competitors are appearing. There were a few small ones that were already around that have sought to jump into the limelight, including things like Hive and Tribel. And then there have been some other upstarts that are rushing to try to be the new Twitter" like Post, T2 and Spoutable.

But, really, after all this, I cannot fathom how anyone can possibly get all that excited about joining yet another centralized social media site. Perhaps I'm biased (note: I am biased) because it was my frustration with the problems of these big, centralized social media services that made me write my Protocols, Not Platforms paper a few years ago. But, after all of that, the big question that kept coming up about it was sure, but how would you get anyone to actually use it."

For years I had argued that the best bet was for one of the big companies to embrace this model and move away from a centralized model to a decentralized protocol setup. Because, it's one thing to build a decentralized social media protocol (lots of people have tried). But it's another thing altogether to get people to use it (lots of people have failed). So, it was exciting when Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter was looking to do exactly that. The Bluesky project has continued to move forward, despite all this mess, though it seems like quite the longshot that Twitter will ever adopt it. I'm still excited about the possibilities for it though.

But, really, what's been fascinating over the past two months has been the rapid resurgence of the fediverse/ActivityPub, with most people focused on Mastodon, one useful and more widely adopted open source software to create a federated social network.

For years, whenever people talked to me about the protocols, not platforms approach to things, and asked about ActivityPub, I frequently downplayed it and brushed it off as less serious. My vision wasn't about federation (where you basically have a large number of mini" centralized players who can all talk to each other), but something that was truly decentralized, where you controlled your own data, and could choose who can connect to it.

However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I'm forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else's fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else's garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.

And then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was likely bigger players would enter the market as well. I've started wondering about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its Gmail moment." Some people may not remember, but Google entering the webmail space on on April 1, 2004 completely upended the concept of email. It was so different and so much more useful, that many people legitimately thought it was a classic April Fool's joke. Prior to that, you either had clunky email from your ISP or you used a slow and complicated webmail provider that would charge you if you used more than 10Mb of storage. And then Gmail showed up with a clean interface, that focused on tags (rather than folders) and drag and drop and (*gasp*) 1 gig of storage. And the entire email space changed overnight.

It seems likely to me that something similar likely could happen with Mastodon. Maybe even Google could do it with their own instance. Or possibly someone brand new. Or maybe someone old. Yesterday, Mozilla announced plans to offer a publicly accessible instance. And that seems like a milestone moment. Automattic (who hosts Techdirt), the owners of Tumblr, have said that Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub as well.

Both of those seem like big moves. Not that Mastodon needs giant players to validate it. It's doing just fine on its own. But one of the big complaints some people have is that they don't know which instance to sign up with, and the whole sign up process seems confusing. Most people who get past that initial concern and just choose an instance and start playing around figure it all out, but even that mental cost of having to pick in instance likely scares off a bunch of people it shouldn't. Having a few mainstream" instances that new users can be directed to seems like it will be really useful.

Also, having some bigger companies developing for ActivityPub can also be useful. Just in the last couple months there has been a fairly astounding set of new Mastodon tools and apps popping up, but, again, having a big Gmail moment" where things start to expand to another level can only help.

Mastodon obviously isn't perfect, and it has some very real issues. Content moderation questions don't go away, obviously, They just become somewhat different (and somewhat the same). But I've been surprised at how quickly the fediverse has already been evolving. I've certainly run across some trolls and spammers, but often they disappear incredibly quickly. Earlier this week, I even had an instance admin reach out to me to apologize for a troll who had been hassling me, which was a different kind of experience than on any other social media site.

There remain some pretty big questions regarding scaling, but so far, I've been pleasantly surprised at how it's all gone. There are certainly a lot of other questions regarding legal issues for instance operators. I hope that those running instances take those issues seriously, and do basic things like register a DMCA agent. But it's increasingly seeming like it might even work?

At least on a personal level, Mastodon currently feels like Twitter around the year 2010, when it was... just fun?

Either way, I'm now much more interested in how the federated system could actually fulfill the promise of the protocols, not platforms vision. Whereas before I had feared the many fiefdoms still involved giving up too much control, the ease for individuals or small groups to set up their own instance has me reconsidering that. I can't find it now, but I saw someone joke something along the lines of the progression Mastodon users go through is something along the lines of 1. Wait, I have to pick an instance? What is that, how do I choose? 2. Oh, I see, this isn't that complicated. 3. I am so freaking excited to try to run my own instance.

That may be an exaggeration, but many people do quickly realize the cool aspects of federation, which allows for a balance between I don't want to have to do everything myself" and oh, hey, I can do everything myself if I want to."

That said, I'm still quite interested in other, even more decentralized ideas out there. I'm excited to play with Bluesky when it's finally available. And over the past few days I've been playing around with nostr, a very, very early, and very, very basic (but extraordinarily simple) new distributed social media protocol that is based on clients and relays. Jack Dorsey (who has been pushing Bluesky, obviously) is also super excited about nostr and has said he thinks it's the realization of my paper. I wouldn't go that far, but I would say it's been really fun to play around with, if you don't mind the fact that it is super, super buggy and probably not very clear for the less technical users. If Mastodon feels like Twitter in 2010, nostr feels like Twitter in the summer of 2006.

All that is to say... there's a lot of fun and interesting development going on none of which relies on a big centralized, VC backed social media company. While those are rushing in to try to fill the void... I'm kinda wondering why would anyone invest in building up a social graph and content on one of those?

We have a chance, collectively, to avoid the mistakes of the last decade and a half. We have an opportunity to not put ourselves (and our data) onto someone else's farm. I absolutely loathe terms like surveillance capitalism" or the phrase if you're not paying for it, you're the product" (because I think both are misleading), but I am perplexed at people who make both of those claims about Facebook and Twitter... and now rush to sign up for some brand new company based on the same sort of model, with the same sorts of risks.

We're at a fork in the road, and it seems like we should be looking to take the other path. The one that is open, not closed. The one that gives us more freedom, not less. The one that pushes the power out to you, the users, rather than the latest billionaire. The power of the internet was that it was built on protocols, and gave the power to the ends of the network.

For whatever reason, the old castles are crumbling. Let's not run to new ones. Let's go back to the more open world that we were promised in the early days of the internet, whether it's ActivityPub or Bluesky or nostr or something totally different. There's no reason to hand over all the control to just one company that doesn't provide an escape path.