Well, Zuckerberg, now you’ve climbed up there it’s a hell of a lot higher than it looked, ain’t it dumbass?
With that out of the way, let’s look at what happens now with “social media.” I’ve said previously that the high-water mark of my own “social media” experience was probably around 2006-07, when Vox was still a thing and Twitter was just emerging as a “mass text” service, for lack of a better description. The last social media app I was genuinely excited about was Foursquare in its original form, partly because of its utility as a social tool (for people younger and more social than I could admit to being, to be honest) and partly because it was the very definition of something that wouldn’t have been possible before Smartphone Time. Obviously there was some concern with someone having a record of where you’d been all the time, but Foursquare was its own thing, not part of Google or Microsoft, so it’s probably okay, yes?
(Key omission there was Facebook. This was before we grasped just how bad it was going to get.)
Flash forward to 2018. What am I using as “social media” now? Twitter, against my better judgement. Instagram, which is probably my go-to even though it’s part of the Facebook empire (at the very least, though, there’s nothing to tie it to my existing Facebook presence). Slack, surprisingly, which has become a collaboration tool inside and outside work alike. And the other group chats – iMessage (for almost everyone I know in the States) and WhatsApp (for almost everyone I know abroad, on Android or both). And that pretty much covers it. Never been on Snapchat (not likely to), Facebook is kept at arms length (and locked down to a fare thee well; I would probably delete it outright if I didn’t want the birthday greetings), and…
Hold up.
The original three Internet programs were telnet, mail and FTP. Everything since then is just some combination of those three functions: connect, message, transfer files. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll throw in another one: RSS. Because when you get right down to it, blog syndication is the root of every social media service. A stream of posts, text or files, from individual sources, showing up in a single feed. I’ll throw in another one: SMS, the primeval mobile text chat solution. Hell, even Twitter was built around the character limit of SMS.
When you break it out like that, it becomes apparent that it wouldn’t be that heavy a lift to build a theoretical framework for an open social networking system, merely by everting it. Instead of everything flowing into one centralized service, have individual services feed back in a standards-based fashion. And here’s where I point to micro.blog, Manton Reece’s project to build an open and interoperable social network alternative. The idea there is that micro.blog provides a simple feed (“timeline”) of posts from a WordPress blog (“followed users”), truncated to 280 characters if longer than that (“tweets”) but otherwise capable of containing all the content of any other blog post. Basically no different than following any number of blogs via RSS, but it’s essentially a tool to facilitate putting them into a Twitter-like framework and thus more easily use it the way you would a social media service.
And in theory, this shouldn’t be difficult at all. You pick your service. WordPress, Movable Type, Tumblr, whatever you’re comfortable in, or even roll your own (as I am contemplating here). At that point, all the micro-blog service is providing is a handy list of posts and an @-name framework to help facilitate replies and threading, and even that could be associated with a more email-style name for additional granularity and decentralization. The second app that goes along with micro-blog is called Sunlit, and it isn’t a service at all, merely a tool for organizing pictures (and if desired, location data) to be more easily posted into your chosen micro.blog source. But the data always lives on your servers. Nothing gets aggregated by micro.blog at all. It’s the thinnest possible skeleton on which individual users then hang their data.
Something like this is going to be a really hard sell to the Muggles, at first. So was social networking in general. But if enough early adopters and technology (spit) influencers were willing to take a hard look and blow up their Facebook and instead work on making the tools to help facilitate this decentralization, it would almost have to trickle down over time. And consider the precedent of not only personal web sites, but email – you can get it from your ISP, or from Google or Yahoo, or from Geocities or Angelfire or just build your own if that’s how you roll, but it doesn’t matter, because anyone can interoperate with anyone else’s.
This can totally be done. It’s just that there’s no money in it, because it doesn’t involve doing for tech bros what their moms used to do for them with a side helping of “send them nudes tho”. But there’s no money in keeping the roads paved and the power on either, yet we find a way to do it, because it’s what you need to get by in a society. As people realize the value of privacy and retaining control over their own data, they might just be willing to put up the money for both.