Been meaning to make this whine-post for some time.
Yes, I was excited with all the discussion last year of the fediverse, the rise of Mastadon (even tho it’s been around for while), the general growing realization of the enshittification of social media.
A new kind of social internet is currently forming. Right now it might still look like ‘Twitter and Reddit, only different,’ but that’s only the very beginning of what’s to come. Hopefully.
Source: Here’s why the fediverse is the future of social networks, and the web – The Verge
But I’ve been banging this drum for a while:
- Something to keep an eye on: Distributed Social Networking Apps (2008)
- Don’t guess the future of the social Web, read it right here. (2009)
- Take back the graph! Facebook, The Cloud, and a return to the basics of social networking (2010)
If those dates seem bunched up, it’s because around that time I was actually trying to build something (roughly 2006-2007) along the lines of taking control of the data streams of your life and others [My greatest story, never much told: Nokia Cloud]
And I’m not the only one who was thinking of these things. There were folks who contributed to the early days of the social, feedable, permalinkable, likable, tunable web back then who also were trying to federate things – knowing full well what would happen if big companies controlled things in silos.
Guess who won out?
Now all of us from back then feel like Cassandras, warning of a future no one believed but gladly accepted like so many frogs in warm water.
Sigh.
Image courtesy of DALL-E, who described the image as: “The image created captures the transition from a centralized and controlled social media landscape to a diverse and decentralized fediverse, reflecting the themes of angst and hope discussed in the article.”
