Well, Zuckerberg, now you\u2019ve climbed up there it\u2019s a hell of a lot higher than it looked, ain\u2019t it dumbass?<\/p>\n
With that out of the way, let\u2019s look at what happens now with \u201csocial media.\u201d I\u2019ve said previously that the high-water mark of my own \u201csocial media\u201d experience was probably around 2006-07, when Vox was still a thing and Twitter was just emerging as a \u201cmass text\u201d 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\u2019t have been possible before Smartphone Time. Obviously there was some concern with someone having a record of where you\u2019d been all the time, but Foursquare was its own thing, not part of Google or Microsoft, so it\u2019s probably okay, yes?<\/p>\n
(Key omission there was Facebook. This was before we grasped just how bad it was going to get.)<\/p>\n
Flash forward to 2018. What am I using as \u201csocial media\u201d now? Twitter, against my better judgement. Instagram, which is probably my go-to even though it\u2019s part of the Facebook empire (at the very least, though, there\u2019s 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\u2019t want the birthday greetings), and…<\/p>\n
Hold up.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s sake, I\u2019ll 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\u2019ll throw in another one: SMS, the primeval mobile text chat solution. Hell, even Twitter was built around the character limit of SMS.<\/p>\n
When you break it out like that, it becomes apparent that it wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s where I point to micro.blog, Manton Reece\u2019s project to build an open and interoperable social network alternative.<\/a> The idea there is that micro.blog provides a simple feed (\u201ctimeline\u201d) of posts from a WordPress blog (\u201cfollowed users\u201d), truncated to 280 characters if longer than that (\u201ctweets\u201d) 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n And in theory, this shouldn\u2019t be difficult at all. You pick your service. WordPress, Movable Type, Tumblr, whatever you\u2019re 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\u2019t 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<\/em> servers. Nothing gets aggregated by micro.blog at all. It\u2019s the thinnest possible skeleton on which individual users then hang their data.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s how you roll, but it doesn\u2019t matter, because anyone can interoperate with anyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n This can totally be done. It\u2019s just that there\u2019s no money in it, because it doesn\u2019t involve doing for tech bros what their moms used to do for them with a side helping of \u201csend them nudes tho\u201d. But there\u2019s no money in keeping the roads paved and the power on either, yet we find a way to do it, because it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, Zuckerberg, now you\u2019ve climbed up there it\u2019s a hell of a lot higher than it looked, ain\u2019t it dumbass? With that out of the way, let\u2019s look at what happens now with \u201csocial media.\u201d I\u2019ve said previously that the high-water mark of my own \u201csocial media\u201d experience was probably around 2006-07, when Vox was … <\/p>\n