* Vox. It was Improved LiveJournal, from the Trotts (who founded SixApart and created LJ to begin with) and it featured a more granular way of handling private or restricted content. Not to mention much nicer page templates. The reason this site is plain black and white is because I haven’t found anything to match the city landscapes they had.
* Early Twitter. Before embedded media, before all the cheats on the 140-character limit, back when it was the sort of thing you could usefully text 40404 to post to. Before it became a firehose fed by a cesspool.
* Instagram. Somehow it just works – best for keeping in touch with friends, actual friends, without the hassle and inconvenience of wading through a ton of garbage the way you can’t avoid with Facebook or Twitter.
What do all these have in common? They’re all limited to a confined group of people to actually socialize with. They aren’t a magnet for the “add this person, add that person” which leads to the sudden realization that you’re following 300 people and don’t actually know half of them. They aren’t overrun with advertising, reblogs, paid content, games, memes, fake news and general shitposting.
I think this is part of why things like Path or Peach had a certain appeal – a social network of your actual friends, not just the randoms in your phone – but you can’t have wildly unlimited growth if you stick to friends. So everything either spirals out of control (Facebook, Twitter, probably Snapchat before long) or fails to ignite (Path, Peach, app.net, Google+). I think the most surprising thing to me is how the personal Slack instance has become a sort of social network (I’m on a couple myself; I’ve lost track of how many the wife belongs to) which is a perfect example of Gibson’s Law (“the street finds its own uses for technology”).
But those shutdown nights on Tuesdays have as often as not turned into a soft shutdown where I pull on the Moto X instead of any of the usual Apple devices – because it limits me to Kindle, Instagram and the family Slack channel, plus Wikipedia lookups if I need them. Which is about right for what I really need for social networking in 2017. Twitter, in particular, needs to die for its sins…but more about that some other time.