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as time goes on I'm increasingly convinced the future isn't social media, but instead better blogging software + software that lets you subscribe to them as if it's "social media", with a "social media"-type interface and propagated shares etc.
a lot of people when you bring these things up go "oh, like twitter but longer posts?" and no -- nothing like twitter. when I navigate to the equivalent of your profile, I would see tags, categories, archives categorized by month, whatever you decided to put in the other areas, etc. "Social media" as it stands separates us from that.
I don't mean 'reinvent google reader', but 'RSS Plus and a good set of clients could obviate a lot of the issues, and free hosting is abundant"
the big problem with RSS and the like is discovery, but if everything shared showed up in a way that was easy to re-share, and comments were rendered like replies, you could get pretty far with 'mastodon but without the issues'
but it'd all need to be in a package the average 50 year old could use. "make a webpage with wix/squarespace building blocks" is the highest technical level this could be without being in "technologist mode" if it is to succeed.
Social media isn't a walled garden -- that metaphor is better applied to the android and apple ecosystems.
Social media is raised beds -- easier to work with, clear bounds, and completely disconnected from the fungal mycelium outside what made it into the bed, which forms it's own network but can never cover the nutrient deficits like it can in some random forest or field.
but you can't do much curation when looking back on your own posts or others' is not just tedious, but actively user-hostile. This is true of all of them, and I'm not sure it's possible to not be true -- after all, their main job is balancing scale with features -- even cohost has this problem.
But that's not the case when everyone's running their blog instance on some free box or like 30 people get together to pay 3 euros/month total for a hetzner server.
Activitypub has the wrong idea -- you already have subscribe functions, you don't need to propagate more than that. You need something that sits on the web, and something that:
- pulls from those
- remembers where you've read
- lets you share to others using the network
- an inbox allowing people to 'dm' / '@' you with nothing to reply to
which is like, RSS 3.0. you could use bittorrent for the shares if you were feeling funinspired.
I don't mean to like, doomsay cohost -- this would be a project that takes a lot longer than a few years. I'm just thinking about how much twitter and mastodon just... the only thing requiring their complexity and scale is that they try to be platforms, but there's very few people who have more than 10k followers, and most of those followers aren't pulling from you at the same time.
I guess the pieces are there and all that's needed is to stitch them together and make them friendly, but that, friends, is the hard part.
A big thing people kind of ignore is that a major part of the value proposition for social media was that it allows companies to outsource their comment sections. Remember "don't read the comments?" Well, that's social media, we're all in the permanent comment section.
Returning to an actual distributed internet is probably good and necessary over time.
