Communities vs. global stage
I think the past 25 years of the commercial Internet have been largely driven by “global stage” services — services which make it easier and easier for individuals to communicate with “everyone”. There may be forums and subforms dedicated to specific topics, but these have by default been accessible to anyone who wants to get in. The next stage of progress on the Internet will increasingly be more private, smaller communities, intentionally closed off from the broader world. Obviously both exist in parallel and always have, but I think the balance is shifting toward closed communities which aren’t merely isolated by topic or technology but actively closed to outsiders.
There’s a risk some of this is projection based on my desires, and it’s possible my desires are unique to me, or have evolved over time as I’ve gotten older (and that this might happen for most users).
As with most things, “the youth” are at the forefront of this. For the past 5+ years, it’s been very common for kids and young adults to have “public” social media accessible and reviewed by parents and others, and “finsta” or other secret, pseudonymous, or locked profiles on various platforms to communicate with friends.
A few reasons why this is happening:
Obvious repercussions for speech, especially difficult to changing standards. A statement which was perfectly acceptable in the past, or was fine in-context, when taken out of context later can lead to “cancellation” — firing from jobs, exclusion from certain groups, etc. Especially for people with evolving views, this can be quite damaging.
Proliferation of spam and abusive content. I think we’re in the brief summer before the eternal September (and nuclear winter) not of new humans on the Internet, but abusive AIs unleashed on the Internet. It’s already possible to create photorealistic images within narrow domains with high success (i.e. infinite “hot girl” photos), and even without AI, the southeast asian captives forced to run SMS/etc spam scams are pervasive. While there are a variety of anti-spam techniques that can work on public networks, they aren’t perfect, and as volume goes up, the absolute number of spam messages can swamp the good messages.
Increased polarization and hostility. It seems crazy to me that a knitting group, cat group, or other relatively benign social group focused on a specific shared interest can become political, but they have, repeatedly. There are more obvious examples as well (the default conservative firearms groups now exist independent of both far right gun groups and leftist gun groups of varying degrees of extremism)
Big platforms like Twitter are probably the big losers here — they essentially are a megaphone store where everyone gets a megaphone and tries to outcompete the others. Platforms like Facebook which have finer grained controls (friends list filtering, groups) may do OK, but they still have a one-size-fits-all content moderation policy which suits no one perfectly. More ephemeral or post vs. poster systems like TikTok might survive this (but, God willing, will die for other reasons…)
New platforms will hopefully provide common technical infrastructure but truly allow independent operation of communities closed to outsiders on their technology. Right now, 90% of the most interesting conversations I have are on private group chats (on Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp); these are essentially controlled entirely by the administrators of those groups, rather than the platform vendors, and aren’t monetized particularly by those.
Federated technologies like Mastodon are a possibility, but Mastodon itself is deeply unsatisfactory technically. There are some alternative implementations which are interoperable and somewhat better, but the overall Mastodon fediverse needs a common identity layer, rather than delegating to individual server operators, with a way for users to retain ownership of their content and potentially port it between instances. It’s possible new crypto based platforms like Farcaster will be successful with this, or it’s possible something entirely new, and maybe involving other media formats, will come next.