People are basically looking for a standalone Facebook groups that's not owned by a corporation. Or Twitter for small groups but not what mastodon has become. I think honourably some people have tried and many continue to build niche products like micro.blog. Personally I just want a service that is not commercially owned, for profit or by a US corporation. My own attempts/ambitions get in the way of being able to achieve it, so I started working on something that slowly solved my own problems e.g news feed aggregation, videos without shorts or the algorithm, chat with AI based on a model from Qatar. Soon I'll add posting but only because I feel like I need some sort of personalised way to bookmark and share my thoughts within it being about gaining attention or validation from a world of likes and retweets.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
kelvinjps · 13m ago
Now I have been using Whatsapp as my only "social media app" basically as stated in another comment: Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message.
And these updates only contain the people who you have as a contact and they have you as a contact, so you only receive the updates of the people you care about and if there is someone you don't want to see their updates you can turn off updates for them.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
alamzin · 30m ago
What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.
andrethegiant · 1h ago
> I think there should also be a reasonable cap on the number of connections that can be made. Something like 300 friends sounds right. Any more than that and you're a collector, and not using the platform to foster connection.
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
“blog as a social network” was/is pretty much Tumblr. Most of the content was structured as posts and updates on your personal page. You didn’t even need to engage with the social part.
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
SilverElfin · 2h ago
The problem is whenever wise people sit out of the popular platforms like today’s social media, society continues most of its speech and politics on those big popular fast social media platforms. So we are all still exposed to its risks.
hboon · 1h ago
What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)?
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
aleken · 17m ago
That's all I use now for REAL social media. My family is in one Signal chat, and my in-laws in a other one. All the social media I need. School groups are unfortunately on Facebook Messenger groups.
kelvinjps · 16m ago
Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message
hboon · 7m ago
Ah. Kind of "decentralized" in a sense. Thanks.
albert_e · 1h ago
Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
TheDong · 59m ago
What you've re-invented is XMPP.
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
GCUMstlyHarmls · 18m ago
> And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
prisenco · 1h ago
I’ve been dreaming of building this.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
sbinnee · 1h ago
I also wish there will be a lot of diverse social media for specific interest groups. I am fine that not many people would use them. I would actually prefer that because I can at least expect people with genuine interest on the topic. Discord in this regard is pretty close to this direction I think.
xnx · 1h ago
Slowcial Media
giveita · 1h ago
It exists: Whatsapp
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
joules77 · 2h ago
> I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward -
1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
There are no good answers, because the reality is the next medium is probably quite different from the last. But yea personalised small group chat, feed, news makes sense.
Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would that legislation look like? My main idea is to simply outlaw ML-based recommendation algorithms, but obviously that is not as simple as it sounds and is mostly based on looking fondly on the earlier days of social media, when I felt like it was making my life better instead of worse.
I hope meta doesn't ruin this feature.
It's Also available in signal I think
Path[1] did that, but with a cap of 50, and then 150 (based on the Dunbar number of meaningful human connections one can retain). They had a crazy growth period but eventually went kaput.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)
It’s hard to explain the difference between it and Twitter if you never used it, but the platform itself creates very different posting ideologies.
Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
I miss chronological feeds the most.
Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.