The social web is in a transition period
Have you been visiting just too many different social media platforms lately, checking them out to see what the deal is? Well, same here. It feels like I've been a guest every night in different houses for the past month and I must say: I am exhausted.
But it's not over, far from it.
And I'm here to give you a heads up: we've witnessed platforms dying in the past, I'm guessing most of us have been a part of some sort of digital exodus before but I have a feeling that this one is going to be more painful.
Mainly because we've created so much data over the years and the majority of it got collected by centralised platforms. There are very few ways to take it with us and move elsewhere, it's all locked in.
Backing up your data now would also be a good idea, before some CEO comes with up the plan that it should be a paid feature.
I just want to say that this is all to be expected because the social web is in a transition period, and that golden bookmark doesn't exist yet. However, I think there are some contenders for it. What I want to ask is: where will you go next?
I've got some ideas, feel free to add your preference if I'm missing anything.
- Threads: Meta's Twitter clone that will be out some time this summer. It will be a federated (ActivityPub-enabled) platform.
- Bluesky: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter clone. This one is also federated but it uses AT Protocol.
- Mastodon: The Twitter clone. It's got a fairly large userbase now, with lots of instances to choose from.
- Blog: Maybe it's not a bad idea to set up shop on a platform like Micro.blog (which is ActivityPub-enabled and has got community features built-in) and lead a quiet digital life.
- Threadiverse: Reddit-alikes.
I come from a time when sites like Tildes were still called forums and Reddit was, at most, a link aggregator, and twitter was a thing used via SMS by people who didn’t have mobile data service.
Once everything got turned into ‘social media’ things really started accelerating towards centralization and, generally, being shit.
It is hard to let my 12-year-old Reddit account go, but they show no signs of any desire to redeem themselves there.
I didn’t have any hesitation in deleting my twitter account when Elon Musk did Elon Musk things, but I was far less invested in twitter, only opening it once in a blue moon when some major news event was unfolding.
I have been mostly hanging out on Mastodon (pretty slick and very active now) and kbin.social (chaotic, growing pains, but enjoyable) for the past few weeks, and just got my invite to Tildes today, so this is my first comment here. I do like the minimal, text-focus nature of things here.
I love the tendency to decentralize. Instead of one golden bookmark, several places to do different things. It increases diversity and avoids things like "social media dictators".
I loved this feature back in ~2009. Back when Twitter was literally just about tweeting stupid stuff like "I'm eating a sandwich for lunch"
The transition period can hardly be over when it hasn't even properly begun yet.
In part I'm looking forward to the new developments and seeing how things will shake out, but also it might be a good opportunity to decrease the reliance on the web platforms for "social" "interaction" altogether. Mindlessly scrolling through feeds for hours, seeing the same old stale jokes, getting enraged or anxious over things that I can't do anything about, arguing with people I will never meet...
I find that I'm a lot happier in the long term when I stay away from it all and just read books or something, but trying to convince my ADHD brain to stay away from cheap dopamine hits is like trying to negotiate my way out of a lion's mouth sometimes.
One thing that I really hope will happen with these shifts is not so much that the legacy platforms of the late-00s - 2010s will die per se, but that we enter a period of atomization rather than consolidation.
IMO, a lot of the really seedy problems that we've seen and attributed to "the Internet" in the last decade or so (like hatemobs that linger for years, doomscrolling, engagement rage, addiction) weren't really "Internet" problems, but more problems that arise when you shove the entire world in a room with each other.
I'm definitely not trying to say that there were not assholes online in the before times, you would 100% have posting enemies and absurd heated disagreements in the forum days, but it was a lot more difficult to follow people around online or drive them off the Internet, because there weren't just 3-4 places to "hang out" and you often wouldn't know where else people were posting.
Platforms with billions of users were never going to be viable social outlets. You can never be "caught up" with Twitter, reddit, Facebook etc, because of the sheer volume of posting and "engagement > all" design. In fact, I kind of dispute the entire "social media" nomenclature at all as I'm not really sure what kind of social interaction that those sites were supposed to be emulating.
I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is that as Twitter and reddit eat themselves, we shouldn't be looking for the "next thing". A greater number of smaller sites is far more likely to produce interactions that leave you feeling okay about using the internet, and ultimately... logging off sometimes.
Personally, I don't think there will be a golden bookmark. Or at least, not for me.
Different sites scratch different itches. I love Mastodon, and I love Tildes (and formerly Reddit) - but I don't think I'd like a site that blended the two. That's kind of what kbin already does, and I'm not too enthusiastic about it.
Either way, I'll definitely be hanging out on Tildes and Mastodon for the foreseeable future. I like the community and culture of each.
I think kbin and Lemmy have good potential, but I also feel like they're way too chaotic right now with the massive influx of new users. I'm looking forward to seeing them stabilise a bit and establish a cultural identity that isn't just "we're here because it's not Reddit".
I'll be completely honest here and say Reddit was perfection. In that, in general, once a website gets too big, it naturally begins to degrade. Reddit had a defense mechanism baked into its design to prevent/slow that very inevitability, and that was subreddits. One subreddit could become overpopulated, and it could even spill into other subs, but the fact that anyone could make a sub meant that Reddit had the ability of a sort of "self-contained migration" where the entire userbase still could gain access to a new sub while staying under the same domain.
That said, with a leadership that has been looking to turn massive profits, no built-in failsafe could have prevented the downfall of that website. Reddit didn't fail because the design of the website was bad, it fell because of the leadership. So the question is really more like, if the perfect website existed, how confident are we with the leadership not chasing money? Or think of it this way, imagine reddit, as-is, with the apps included, even the mods, a carbon-copy MINUS every submission / comment. Just a blank slate but with everything else up and running. If such a thing were to exist, but also be ran by the same Reddit, INC company, it would still be doomed. But ran by a reincarnated Aaron + a little convincing to turn it down a notch with the freedom of speech just a tiny tad, I'm certain it would be massive in less than a year. Because the design of the system itself is pretty nice.
I don't think there will ever be a "golden bookmark" for me again because that implies centralization and all the problems that comes with that.
I have my blog and my fedi. And now tildes.
Im fine with these and if tildes goes suddenly away, guess theres kbin but its too chaotic like reddit to be useful for me. Too much image spam.
I was fine without reddit for 5 years. Will continue to be fine without any not-reddits too.
I do miss tales from tech support though.
I have 6 different options in my bookmarks, including Reddit, but without any of Meta's networks or Twitter. It will be a lot of content, but I will settle somewhere or create and aggregator in time.
Having options is good. Being in a transition phase is better, especially if we keep the decentralization.
I hope not to hurt any feelings. I will also say that i donated (supported) the project when Manton started raising money for it, and then i paid for a subscription for over a year. I still have no idea how micro.blog works.
I had a personal blog in 2003. I was on Twitter I'm 2008. I tried virtually every blogging platform. I have been on virtually every social media. I worked in tech. I say all this to show that I'm somewhat tech savvy.
I still can't figure out how to use micro.blog.