This seems interesting. Someone linked it to me. Has anyone used it or know anything about it? It seems like there are multiple parties thinking in serious ways about what we might call the “alt social media problem” and how to design really great cultural and intellectual spaces online. Sofiechan obviously included. Lots of similar mechanism design ideas in the backends too.
Are we on the cusp of a new wave of alt social media, or are a bunch of different teams getting stuck in a tarpit idea?
There may be a wave, but I don't know that it's new. It seems like there's alway been platforms sprouting up in the shadow of the big players (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). There were a bunch in the blockchain space, with Farcaster probably the largest. The challenge is for any of them to gain traction. Due to network effects, social media seems to be a natural oligopoly. It doesn't mean something new can't succeed, just that it's very hard.
>>3083 Yeah it's probably very hard for something to become one of the big ones or have an impact outside of some specific community or industry with a naturally segregated network effect. I doubt there will be big disruptions without major format innovations (tiktok is the most recent format innovation). LLMs seem to have a lot of promise but no one has figured out how social media changes given LLMs. But still, there seems to be a long tail of demand for smaller players, different formats, specific communities, etc. Lots of interesting things could still be done.
One thing worth considering is that our society has gone way overboard into diminishing returns on communications, public gossip, entertainment media, etc. There's little to do there that seems useful. But at the same time we've lost the plot on intellectual *depth*. Not enough independent deep collaborative study of interesting problems. Much of that is social, funding, political, etc and outside the scope of better communications software, and the classic "tools for thought" bush/engelbart/licklider memeplex seems to be a variety of utopian bullshit. But still, building a research community of some kind may be benefitted by custom software to do their particular kinds of accounting.
I believe strongly in the inevitability of new alt-media spaces and digital enclaves that cater to specific scenes. Referring to the failure of past players, I think this has much less to do with network effects and far more with the fact that none of them have effectively captured cool. The only founders imprudent enough to work on social media are typically subpar, unable to compete in flashier, better-funded arenas, yet still carrying the pallid, disconnected demeanor of the startup stock (a personal, possibly unsubstantiated bias). This is especially unhelpful when the most imperative factor for success is discernment in what would capture the youth. Most try to outsource this role by way-of-the-startup: unsubtle, abrasive ad spend in hopes of seeding community and reeling in taste makers. But this itself runs counter to the nature of cool. Cool is curated. It is unsolicitous. It reveals itself in its distance from both the viewer and the accessible. It is a closed club where those who get it, get it, and those who don’t are frumpy and irrelevant. The few founders I’ve seen who had some command over relevant social capital tend to shed it quickly once their context shifts to accommodate the demands of venture capital.
BlueSky tried to simulate this with a literal closed club, using friend-only invitations. The flaw in this model is the accessibility of its allure; it presents a binary of being in or out, and that is a mental model that can be conceived by everyone. Cool things will always attract those who want to be perceived as cool more than those who are, and leaving the door slightly ajar quickly invites infestation. The subpar flood the feed, with poor appropriations the aesthetics of cool, and then shift and abandon those aesthetics altogether. The only allure for the clever to waddle for a tighter audience is if that audience retains its enhanced command or quality, and they bail at the first sign of rot. From what I saw this was exactly what happened, and then relying on "Twitter that is not Twitter" will always be a weak pitch.
Imo the most successful social media app in recent years ignored cool and instead was predicated on child predation. TikTok literally groomed a generation of children into a familiarity buying out an established digital niche (Musical.ly) acclimating them to the strobing, 15 second short-video format before upselling it to older generations. This was already a well-articulated bet, the format had taken off massively in China a year prior to their acquisition through the success of Douyin. Consequences are a bit too obvious to explain (better matching algorithms, the ubiquity of Reels, rise of alt news sources) but I have seen very few founders bold enough to play with format. Boldness is probably too generous, they lack the spirit to begin with.