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.

I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms came in and decided that because I am not liking every post of that person it follows that I am not interested.

The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord.

You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people.

Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.

The author invented and then dashed against the rocks a few existing fediverse platforms in the course of a couple paragraphs.

These things already exist and struggle exactly because people comfortable with the walled garden approach forgot what FB was like in 2006 when you only knew 15 people on there. The lack of critical mass of your personal contacts outside of the walls is exactly how FB and IG keep you from venturing outside the walls.

Friendica is one of several fediverse platforms the author basically describes. You can even self-host an instance for yourself and friends/family.

And you may say:

> I tried Mastodon once, which is not immediately intuitive, and the apps aren't perfect. Plus, the wikipedia article describes something that isn't perfect, so I shouldn't bother.

Perfect. IMO, the minuscule friction to enter is the benefit. The walled gardens exist and hold people in such high numbers exactly because they've reduced the friction to enter and increased it to leave. The definition of a trap, yes?

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.

WhatsApp and Telegram are my slow social media. They ring only for the very few people I really care about. Everything else accumulates in their chats.

I get some link to FB and TikTok in my chats and groups but I don't open all of them. I don't have the apps, so if I do I open them in the browser. I'm not logged in. No TikTok account. Links to Instagram are very rare. No account. I check WhatsApp and Telegram when I feel like, no pressure.

I also dream for this. Personally I would remove likes/reactions though. As we've seen with Instagram it's too easy to chase that dopamine rush/compare number of likes. Comments are enough in my opinion.

Well intentioned, but never going to work. Social networks will always create financial incentives that have to be contended with. No network that can connect to “close” people, will always result in some nodes on the graph that connect to a “large portion of people”.

Always. This broadcast ability is then a path to financial renumeration, which will see the rise of copy cats and another arms race to gather attention from people on the network.

Fundamentally, information / clout / something is resistant to being distributed equitably on information networks, especially online networks.

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.

A lot of his ideas remind me of the BeReal app, it limits posts per day and is geared toward 'friends in real life' and with just a few friends on it I've stayed engaged. But it's sparse for me and can be a ghost town much of the time, but that may be just because my friend group isn't using it much. There needs to be sufficient network effect to maintain and grow it's reach as a network, which may be antithetical to its founding principles.

> 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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

I love this. It is close to what we've built with Peergos [0].

1. People have to accept you as a follower, and the default is bi-directional.

2. There are no visible follower/friend counts.

3. Chronological feed which has an end (no infinite scroll)

4. No arbitrary character limit

5. No analytics (enforced by E2EE)

We don't have a max friends/number of posts per day though.

[0] https://peergos.org/posts/decentralized-social-media

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.

How about https://slowly.app/ ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_(app)

“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.

I’ve been dreaming of building this.

I miss chronological feeds the most.

The article is basically describing Friendster, which was the first big social media platform after MySpace. I have zero social media accounts (for all the reasons described) but wouldn’t mind a Friendster-like platform.

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

Replacing the current social media giants is incredibly hard because of network effects and lock-in. Could we instead implement most of the OP's ideas with a client for an existing social media site that filters out all the crap?

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)

back in 2009 in Spain we had what the author describes in Tuenti (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuenti). at first it was invite only and by default people's profiles were private, you'd need to be friends to see their activity and pictures. your feed was just your friends statuses and new pictures in chronological order.

later on it got some games and a realtime chat but it ended up dying because of newer social networks. it was great to keep your actual friends and family connected.

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.

I think something like a Whatsapp that recommends contacts that can be close is good enough. Something like friends of friends recommendations. But no more.

Most people wouldn't enjoy something like https://github.com/dimkr/tootik

Bluesky and Mastodon are exactly this IMO. No algorithm, just following people.

It exists: Whatsapp

Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.

What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.

I wrote a lil blog post after reading this this morning: https://awarm.leaflet.pub/3lyzchme2d22b

tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.

Slowcial Media

use nostr. it can be anything you want it to be.

> 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.

Minor formatting quip: At the top, the "dd mm yyyy" format should not use a comma.

I guess if you could convince your friends & family to use something like https://friendi.ca/ it could work for you.