We’ve been seeing the decline of both Facebook and Twitter for some time now. MySpace is not even remembered by young people, and at one time it was so dominant that it was a question of whether it had gained a monopoly on the internet. The free market is working here, and it tends to solve such problems in ways that we wouldn’t expect.
The problem of MySpace’s dominance has been solved by the market through Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. Today, you don’t hear anything about MySpace. I think this is exactly what Facebook and Twitter are facing. But what will replace them?
Social networks of the future
I believe that the social networks of the future will not be owned by large corporations. They won’t even be owned by anyone. Quite a bold idea at the moment, don’t you think? It raises a few issues, such as who will develop it when there’s no profit, who will fund the servers, and so on. Yes, yes, we’ll get to that.
But first, let’s talk about what the problems are with current social networks:
Lack of freedom of speech
Please don’t get me wrong. I consider the present to be a time when we have absolute freedom of speech thanks to the internet, which is a good thing. However, it does not apply locally (in the context of the internet). Social networks set their own rules about what can and cannot be on it. We have a lot of freedom of speech, but not on Facebook.
Loss of privacy
Facebook may know more about me than I do. And I don’t even have to actively post it there. The algorithm picks up data from what link I open, what post I stop at, or what video I skip or finish watching. With this data, they can show me more relevant ads and thus increase their value and price. Where this data goes next, though, I have no control over at all.
Content curation
For the last few months, Facebook has become almost impossible to use. I see messages from my friends minimally. Instead, I see a lot of content that I have no way of marking that I want to follow. However, Facebook thinks it would be nice if I could see it.
How to solve it?
What alternatives do we have? Personally, I see great potential in a network called Fediverse. It’s like an Internet protocol for social networking. Anyone can program their own social network that can join the Fediverse, and such a network will be compatible with others in the Fediverse. So I can interact on my own social network with people from other social networks connected to Fediverse.
Clearly the average person is not going to program their own social network. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to. The most widely used social network in the Fediverse is Mastodon. This one works in an interesting way. It is an open source project, and anyone can download it, install it on their server, and connect to the Fediverse. Many people have done this, and many allow other users to register. So all you have to do is find a Mastodon server and register as you would on a regular site.
Does censorship work here? Yes. Each server has its own rules and it’s up to you which one you register on. Some have very liberal rules, others are stricter. You can also block users who annoy you or you just don’t want to interact with them. Server level blocking also works. So if there is a server that tolerates child pornography, for example, most servers will block it and nothing like that will appear on the network.
What about privacy? Of course, the first thing to remember is that whatever we write faithfully on the Internet becomes public. With private messages, it is the case that the server owner has access to private communications. However, anyone who cares very much about privacy can set up their own server and their data will be fully under their control.
What’s probably the best thing about Mastodon is that it doesn’t modify what users see in any way. The posts are chronologically ordered, and anyone who wants to can make lists on a specific topic and be free to follow what they want.
RSS
But what I wanted to write about from the beginning is RSS. You probably know it, it’s a technology more than 20 years old and it allows you to follow news on websites that generate an RSS feed.
Maybe you didn’t know: Podcasts work via RSS.
This is exactly how I envision the social network of the future. A simple technology that anyone can use freely, without any restrictions. It’s ad-free, completely free, and the user is in full control of their privacy.
Mastodon generates an RSS feed for each user, you don’t have to be registered when you want to follow someone (for example me). You can publish via RSS in different ways. A regular WordPress site generates an RSS feed, and so do almost all blogging tools.
I believe that this is the future of communication on the Internet. We don’t need more companies creating the new Facebook. We need enthusiasts who will develop open source projects for communication.
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