Will The Future See Interconnected Social Media Platforms? (theverge.com) 37
"For the last two decades, our social networking and social media platforms have been universes unto themselves," writes the Verge's editor-at-large:
Each has its own social graph, charting who you follow and who follows you. Each has its own feed, its own algorithms, its own apps, and its own user interfaces (though they've all pretty much landed on the same aesthetics over time). Each also has its own publishing tools, its own character limits, its own image filters. Being online means constantly flitting between these places and their ever-shifting sets of rules and norms. Now, though, we may be at the beginning of a new era. Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.
If this ActivityPub-fueled change takes off, it will break every social network into a thousand pieces. All posts, of all types, will be separated from their platforms. We'll get new tools for creating those posts, new tools for reading them, new tools for organizing them, and new tools for moderating them and sharing them and remixing them and everything else besides.
He's talking about a decades-old concept called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. ("Sometimes the P is also 'Post,' and the E can be 'Elsewhere.' The idea is the same either way." The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms... [Y]our blog becomes the hub for everything, your main home on the internet.
The article argues that for now, "the best we have are tools like Micro.blog, a six-year-old platform for cross-posters." But the article ultimately envisions a future with not just new posting tools, but also new reading tools "with different ideas about how to display and organize posts."
If this ActivityPub-fueled change takes off, it will break every social network into a thousand pieces. All posts, of all types, will be separated from their platforms. We'll get new tools for creating those posts, new tools for reading them, new tools for organizing them, and new tools for moderating them and sharing them and remixing them and everything else besides.
He's talking about a decades-old concept called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. ("Sometimes the P is also 'Post,' and the E can be 'Elsewhere.' The idea is the same either way." The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms... [Y]our blog becomes the hub for everything, your main home on the internet.
The article argues that for now, "the best we have are tools like Micro.blog, a six-year-old platform for cross-posters." But the article ultimately envisions a future with not just new posting tools, but also new reading tools "with different ideas about how to display and organize posts."
There used to be tools to do this automatically... (Score:4, Informative)
but Facebook, Twitter/X, and the like have repeatedly banned them all from API access and constantly work to thwart them. So you wind up spending money for something that breaks and has to be fixed every month or so.
In a "best case" world, your favorite tool breaks, you wait 3 weeks for it to get fixed, it works again for a week then FB/Twitter-X break it again. In a "worst case" world, your account gets banned for "botting" and you have to start over, again and again and again.
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ActivityPub is almost literally *email* for social media. You only need 'one' email address to interact with every other email address on the internet. If you like FB, why can't you follow Twitter from that account? etc.
'Federated', ala the Fediverse, is what the internet
Re: There used to be tools to do this automaticall (Score:2)
The worst case is if those platforms agrees to actually integrate and cooperate for maximum tracing and doxxing killing all privacy.
Then some criminals figure out how to clone your identity and take control of all your properties. Or even empty the bank accounts of your employers.
Note that these aren't all ActivityPub (Score:2)
Bluesky, for example, is ATProto. Which IMHO is a better architecture than ActivityPub (but is less mature). ActivityPub tends to lead to fiefdoms where the lords of the domain have absolute control, from censoring you based on spite to just deleting all your data. Cross-domain search is poor, and duplication is extensive. With ATProto, moderation isn't done by sites, but rather by moderation layers, which tag posts; you can subscribe to whatever moderation layers you want. Indexing for search is more ce
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Maybe when it decides to not be a silo it might be useful. But given that's created by Silo people, I'm not holding my breath.
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Work to improve the existing standard, sure, but just creating something 'else' is still being a Silo.
Maybe when it decides to not be a silo it might be useful. But given that's created by Silo people, I'm not holding my breath.
At present, TRUE.
FALSE. The entire protocol is designed around federation. It's not yet ready to fully deploy in a multisite manner, but ATProto is entirely structured around federation.
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A colleague of mine liked the phrase "Demonstration trumps discussion".
BlueSky is still a discussion, ActivityPub is demonstrated and functional...at scale. Certainly not perfect...but that's not exactly a unique criticism of any system.
I'll be happy when it does actually start doing what it claims...until then it's a silo, begat from a silo,
No (Score:4, Informative)
What is it, Betteridge's Rule of Headlines: if a headline asks a question, the answer is always no? I think that's the name.
No. Social media added nothing that couldn't be done before. The centralization was the point - it provided a single place where people could post their pictures and thoughts and whatever. You could have accomplished almost all of what Facebook does by email lists or news groups, but it was the ease of use and the single location to do it that made it work for your average user.
People by and large don't want to run their own websites. Mastodon already exists and already provides most of what these "new tools" would do, and it hasn't replaced X or Facebook and shows no sign that it's going to. Bluesky is a joke, its major feature is that it's the social media service you can't use, because it's invite-only and you're not invited.
It turns out that your average user doesn't want to deal with understanding how to find people across multiple sites, doesn't want to pay to run their own server, and most certainly doesn't want to deal with keeping software up to date. They just want a tool that works.
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They just want a tool that works.
The enlightenment may come when they realize they *are* the tool and they are working just fine and as designed.
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Protocols will be better long term. HTTP, Email etc. They 'just work' but unfortunately aren't flashy...and definitely weren't polished in their early days. It'll get there, but it will take time/trials/errors while also fighting
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No.
No means no.
Re:No. The present already does. (Score:2)
PSYC (1995) was an early attempt at this. (Score:3)
Apparently, it didn't work out nearly three decades ago, and with the tendency of social web services to cannibalize each other until only one remains for a certain application, it probably won't work today either.
I sure do effing hope ... (Score:2)
... the future will see the long overdue update/replacement of DNS and the successor to this steam age protocol/service called "E-Mail" that will probably replace all things "social media" in 3 months or so. After all, that's the reason social media exists in the first place. Because email was designed before computers even were networked and telex prototypes were the hot new sh*t.
depends? Can Elon Musk (Score:2)
Re:depends? Can Elon Musk (Score:4, Informative)
afford to buy them all and break them?
He's using his experience [mercurynews.com] destroying [variety.com] Twiiter [cbsnews.com] as a testbed. Once he formalizes the process it won't take a year to break them.
The Verge? (Score:1)
/. editors think that editors at The Verge are computer architecture experts. The dumbing down of computing is truly bottomless.
"Now, though, we may be at the beginning of a new era."
Sure we are. The world is about to be revolutionized by the invention of APIs and interoperability. SuperKendall is now an architecture expert.
Why should they? (Score:2)
The business model of social media is based on the ability to draw users from other platforms and keep them from leaving. Why should they be interested in a free flow?
Euphemistic misreading (Score:2)
GrayJay (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
THEY will fight this, because it is good for the People, so it's great that Rossmann is a veteran of fighting Big Tech.
The multi-armed octopuss (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was managing social media for a community organization, i'd set up accounts on 15 different platforms and was copying and pasting text and pictures to each one manually, allowing for different capabilities and formating quirks of each one. I wanted something that would let me write an announcement once, and then go post it to each platform. I gave HootSuite a whirl. I didn't end up using it because it was very clunky and only supported several of the platforms used. It was also a serious pain trying to set up the API access. Hootsuite seemed unfinished at worst, and I always thought it would be great if there were a browser extension which took it the whole way. Write the post once, with the GUI showing when you've passed character limits for one platform or another, and alerting when embeds or styles would be different so you could try for something generic enough to look good in most of the sites.
With a tool like this posting to both siloed and federated social media, you could be sure that your post continued to live somewhere and could be retrieved. The tool could keep it's own archive too.
Take the whole thing one more step, and the tool could work like the ultimate RSS reader, providing a seamless feed from multiple social media networks, also aggregating comments in one place. Share a post with all of your other accounts with one click. Don't like The Algorithm choosing posts for you? Just ask the reader to watch for all new posts from any person or group instead of just accepting filtered feeds. Instead of using API to get and make posts, I guess I would just browse the social media sites with a crawler that masqueraded as a real human using a real browser.
Another great idea existed in a browser extension from 10-15 years back, which would add rich comments to almost anyone's web site. I forget what it was called, but it was everything that Disqus is, except it wasn't something the website admin embeded in the website code. When the plugin recognized a website page (or even a board post) which it had comments for, it showed them in a sidebar or embed window. If you wanted to add a comment to a page which didn't support comments (or you were banned, or simply didn't trust the mod to not censor you) you would add it to the sidebar, and everyone else who opted-in to use the plugin could see it. It didn't interact with, let alone modify the website's server at all. In fact, the website admin couldn't prevent the browser extension from appearing, nor moderate the comments since it was entirely run by an outside entity. This didn't go over well with certain admins who found their control over criticism or other reviews of their ideas and products slip away from them.
Unfortunately, some judge outlawed it, buying the weak complaint that this plugin was "making unauthorized modifications" to the poor admin's websites, and seemingly setting a precident that admins had an entitlement not to have their website's look_and_feel changed in a user's own browser client, and gave them an entitlement to control all of the comments. The same complaint could probably be made against adblocker plugins which exclude content from a website or a browser that supports light/dark modes.
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Thanks for this lead! Actually, I found the old CritSuite website on archive.org and they had a list of similar "annotation-related projects". I believe the gadget I was thinking of was "ThirdVoice". They were accused of supporting "online vandalism" and obscenity and got sued, but they actually just ran out of money.
RSS (Score:5, Insightful)
We had this many, many years ago... (Score:3)
Cloudflare says no (Score:2)
Please verify that you are a HUMAN.
Interconnected platforms used to be the norm (Score:2)
No social media in the future (Score:3)
There won't be any social media in the future or internet, both are dying and for a good reason. The reason being that the experience of both of those things has not been good on the human wide scale and if history if anything to go by, when the human race has bad experience with anything, it is removed from society. Either quickly or slowly. Both the internet and social media are going to be removed slowly, for now, but that might change in the future.
This is going to take more than 10 years to happen, long as 20 years. It is going to happen, just as television stations (and streaming interestingly) is also slowly dying.
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Social media isn't going anywhere.
No matter where content is hosted, there must be a means of finding it. In the early days of the Internet, search engines worked fine when it was run by geeks and everyone had their own web site, but most people just love to congregate into little exclusive cliques, so the natural end point is that they will pool together. Once the Internet went mainstream, and it was all over for web sites.
I remember when my web site and forum were getting over 3,000 regular visitors a m
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The internet is going away, this just takes time. Just like when forums and IRC died. Because the internet exist, its still online but those platforms are dead and gone in reality. When the internet goes, they go. Social media is going to be long dead by that time and its already starting. It takes time for 5,3 billion people to get off the internet. There are around 5 billion users that use some type of social media. This takes time to end.
In 2005 there where around 1 billion people online. It took 18 year
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There won't be any social media in the future or internet, both are dying and for a good reason.
The Web is not the Internet. However, the notion that either is going away anytime soon (unless mandated by law) is ridiculous at best.
Title. (Score:2)
Funny fibre to bellybutton (Score:2)
But no way for internet to use distributed stores.
Illegal, banned or clunkified
Follow the money (Score:2)
Social media is (slowly) dying as it turns out to be very very difficult to squeeze money out of people by advertising to them when advertising is already every almost everywhere and people are getting better at tuning it out. Hosting and administrative needs come with legal exposure and expenses.
So what if you just hosted an index that pointed to everyone's self-hosted vanity feeds so that other people could take the content and display it in the interface of their choice? Most of the legal exposure and