> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
Content and opinions that change like the weather, just for clicks and engagement. It’s a long way from integrity and responsibility from these influencers.
> I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that
nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
I think that Larry's mostly kidding and it's not really some implied threat of violence in person. Just that we're better at politeness and restraint in person because we see a real human in front of us instead of something abstract on a screen.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
In the old days of the Internet where everyone was pretty much anonymous you were exposed to a reality where anyone could prove you wrong. You spent a few years online you grew accustomed of the idea that there are people there much more knowledgeable than you. It didn’t bother you that much to be wrong because everyone is wrong on something and this shaped your tolerance. You enter the social media now and that tolerance goes out of the window because you can block people, delete their comments and reign supreme in your ignorance.
I'm a fan of smaller communities that are semi-open: invite-only, but invites aren't that hard to get. Lobsters works that way. The BlueSky folks are designing "permission spaces" [1] that might be used to build that, though it's a bit early to say.
Bluesky/ATProto is (for all that concerns non-developers) a Twitter clone. I think the nostalgia of pre-enschitifed socials is pushing us to try and recreate the experience but I don’t think it would work because it’s not 2010 anymore.
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
I find that this also applies to engagement. I’ve compulsively used Mastodon and this very site, neither of which you would probably claim to be very maliciously designed.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
Please commit to your beliefs and sign out, don't come back, if you think that way about social media. Stop proving your point wrong by using social media like hacker news comments, if you think social media so blanketly bad, useless, & ineffective.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale?
For example:
A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]
Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]
And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]
I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.
But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.
As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.
Focusing on protocol and decentralisation is putting the cart before the horse. The reason why Twitter, and Reddit in particular work so well is because of sub-communities that form organically. More importantly, discovery was part of the value in using it. It's why every Mastodon community specific to one niche/subject is not very interesting, people are not one single interest, we follow someone we like for one reason, maybe it's they make cool art, then we find out they also make music too, then bam, you discover a new genre of music and the community around it. Decentralisation actively introduces friction into the most rewarding loop of the entire thing. Centralisation isn't the problem, it's just comorbid with shitty governance.
I bet on ATProto the last year, I've left this year. The network has been shrinking and the Bluesky leadership has been misleading about "user" numbers and hiding that they took private equity money. The atmo fund looks like a bunch of self dealing. I no longer trust any of them.
This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
I haven't really tried doing anything with ATProto, but I do regularly see content from some folks who are into it, and the thing I like about ATProto is how generally cheerful and friendly and happy the ATProto community is. They're out there with all of the zeal of the old blockchain devs, except without the inky black evil of that movement. Mind you, being a happy community mostly means projects that are either doomed or else ridiculous (looking at you, Doom-on-ATProto guys), but it feels like giddy old school hacks, and that makes me smile.
Isn't this just reinventing the wheel of a website, an email list and a message board?
Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?
> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing
[...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.
How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
I like the future that the ATProto evangelists are painting. I would love for it to happen. But I am skeptical that a protocol is going to solve an incentive problem.
In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.
Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.
For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.
While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.
I am all-in on face to face relationships and no longer investing in the fiction of socializing with people through a screen (or only over the phone). And I've been here since low baud modem days and through every niche internet community and medium you can think of.
Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.
Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.
I think that a lot of people are going to get ATProto whether they want to or not. I don't want to believe that anyone involved with it at in a decision-making or policy-driving capacity is a big enough loser to only want better social media out of it. Decentralized web apps are a proof of concept.
> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology.
I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.
Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.
The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid, which is by far the best discussion on the internet for me, and other than that some discord servers for games I play.
Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.
Maybe it's because I watched The Expanse too many times, I'm kinda attracted by their concept of COMM system.
Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call).
When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.
The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text).
How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it.
I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected.
Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.
Not trustworthy. The providers mentioned in the article, blacksky and bluesky, presumably the most visible ones, do not allow signups with anonymous email providers even though they make you pass a human verification step.
The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.
The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.
The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
X just unified the feed across languages such that all posts automatically get translated for users. These kinds of innovations are much more important than the ability to be able to switch apps.
I was disappointed by the hard divergence from core aspects of Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision (and its current implementations) of a Web 3.0 but oh well. Threads got on board, and it’s not to say the missing parts can’t be bolted on later. In particular any future W3C Linked Web Storage WG protocols.[1]
Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them.
Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life.
Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.
Bluesky has all the things that made Twitter a cesspool: a small character limit (300 is still too small) and virality stats (likes/retweets). Its only saving grace right now is that it's itty bitty; if it ever achieved scale it would have the same core problems. Which is to say, if you're betting on ATProto, try a Bluesky w/o those things.
But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.
It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.
152 comments
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
Bingo. Not a big (or even a small) user of social media. But small, focused communities are where I see it bring the most value for the user.
They are also where I've seen the most interesting initiatives since the 90s. The rest is just influential "people" broadcasting their content.
> I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
> "The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Every single day of my life in the past 25 years, whenever I interact with any people online, I have been thinking of this quote:
https://bash-org-archive.com/?4281
This is the ultimate, unsolvable problem of the Internet. In the real world, being an asshat very quickly leads to being punched in the face.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
[1] https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
For example:
A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse. Notably, all attempts at conscious intervention failed to help or made things worse. [1]
Rather than fostering closer relationships, the algorithms and structures underlying social media platforms inadvertently contribute to profound psychological harm - particularly among teenagers, who are disproportionately affected by curated online personas, peer pressure to present a perfect digital image, and constant notification bombardment. [2]
And from Meta's own internal UX research, surfaced in recent harm-related court filings: researchers described Instagram as functionally a drug, users as binging to the point of reward deficit, and the platform's role as that of a pusher. [3]
I've gradually opted out of social media over the last few years. That Meta internal research was the thing that finally pushed me to delete IG, the last social app I was still using. My life has been noticeably calmer and better adjusted since - which makes me skeptical that a better protocol, rather than a fundamentally different relationship with technology and socialization, is our way out of the current mess.
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03385v1 [2] https://scholar.dsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&con... [3] https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480... (p. 33)
But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.
As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.
This year, I'm betting less social media as being better and in the long-run a new protocol that learns from the mistakes.
Are the scientists referenced in this article really so averse to having a website or corresponding via email that they need a social media instance to chat with every Tom, Dick and Harry that can't put up with the friction of clicking a mailto: link? How did that go during Covid, when everyone on Twitter suddenly became an infectious disease specialist?
> So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing [...] you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.
How is that different from moving to a new web host or newsletter provider? And what happens if your Bluesky connections don't move over to the new thing? Or if Bluesky chooses to create a read-only archive of your posts and changes the UI to obscure the ATproto ID or whatever it is that certifies the content as being "yours"?
In the beginning Twitter was very free and open with API access. There were plenty of alternative apps. Of course, that changed when they got serious about monetizing.
Would it really be any harder for Bluesky to switch from ATProto to a proprietary API than it was for Twitter to close their API? How many users are realistically going to download their archives and upload them to some other provider? If most people are using the website or official app, that's where the stickiness is. There would be a blog post with a title like "Supporting the Bluesky Community for the Next Century" and how it's better to have a centralized site that can feed its employees than an idealistic decentralized one that disappears. Things would seem OK at first. But enough years of chasing quarterly KPIs would put them in the same spot as Twitter and Facebook.
For example, pre-Elon Twitter, I thought Twitter was going to around a long time and I would continue to use it for many years. I left Twitter when Elon bought it.
While I'm on various social media sites now, I can fairly easily pick up a new one as I see fit. And if my audience doesn't want to follow me there, they don't have to. And I can find different people to follow on that new one.
You never know what is going to happen.
Eventually I decided to prioritize my health over everything -- job, friends, extended family, hobbies -- transient relationships with things & people just don't matter any longer. If you want community you have to cultivate it and it isn't real if it isn't deeply intertwined with most of your life.
Also, owning my own copies of things too, from books to music to video tutorials. It either goes ona shelf or in the NAS and gets indexed.
> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology.
I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.
Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.
And a little bit better but still not quite there doesn't do it for me.
Global social networks are cancer no matter the protocol, that's my opinion after many years trying to carve out a use for them in my life. No matter how hard I try to curate my feeds, inevitably they make me more angry, sad, and combative in my online life.
Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call).
When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmission transparently.
The data transceiving can be done in real-time if the participants are near. If not, then it will work similar to how email is exchanged (except the data stream is multimedia, not just text).
How is this relates to AT Protocol (and maybe ActivePub)? Well, AT Protocol is designed to be used in "social network" settings, but "social network" was largely evolved from people forwarding emails etc. I think if you could build a really good COMM protocol that allows people exchange information quickly and efficiently, then it should be fairly easy to add social elements on top of it.
I think the idea of building a "social network protocol" itself is wrong. People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc. Maybe smart people should focus on building a protocol to enable all that, rather than just trying to build something that poorly mimics what the big platform has already perfected.
Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well, no matter how good the protocol is. So maybe just build something else instead then.
The link in the article for Blacksky (blackskyweb.xyz) has a dark pattern that attempts to get you sign up for bluesky instead of blacksky. Odd.
The bigger issue is funding - currently appears to be VC funded (seed round 2023, Series A 2024), so they'll want a return at some point. Voilà, enshittification.
The biggest selling point - portable identity - is a mirage because the current providers do not give you the cryptographic keys to your identity. So they can simply lock you down, and your 'identity' is done.
> I don’t think any social media platform was designed to do this. But it’s where most of them have ended up.
They were, quite literally, designed to do this. They needed to monetize the user base to pay for the server costs. Zuck wanted a business.
I don’t need it so much to seek an alternative.
You have a protocol that makes it easy to concentrate the self-same toxicity it is trying to prevent.
I'd like to become social online.
[1] https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/
Didn't the original facebook only show you posts of friends? Made by them or intentionally reshared by them.
Stop at that and you get rid of the influencer spam. The danger of placing yourself in a bubble is still there, but at least it's a bubble of your friends, that you could have got yourself into even in real life.
Of course, there's the question of how you finance this.
But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.
It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.