Attention social media services - We don't need more distros

With Twitter circling the drain for nearly a year, there has been a race to become the new short, punchy, text-based platform. I think we are wasting our time with these various platforms. We don’t need new protocols. We need to build on the one’s that already exist.

As someone who spent 10+ years in marketing, I’ve been following the news around each of them with curiosity. But, never once considering testing any of them. That’s what over a decade in marketing will teach you. You will learn that Marketing and Sales want to do evil things together and are willing to run a scorched earth policy against their own customers just to make a chart go up.

Here’s why I think we need to stop with the new protocols and platforms, and instead encourage more growth on top of what already exists: ActivityPub.

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1. We don’t need more distros

In the world of Linux, there is often a debate over the amount of distros available. To some its a strength, there’s an option for everyone. To others, we don’t need more distros, we need more software that runs on those distros.

I fall in the second camp.

To me, the roll of the distro is to make a stable, safe, reliable, base for me to load as a toolbox. The toolbox needs to be nice, but the tools are the most important part. That’s the software I use on a daily basis to get my job done and play with as a hobby. That is not to say the distro isn’t important, however it is much more important to have people make amazing things that run on top of the distro, not yet another Debian-based Gnome/KDE variant.

This is the same for all these social networks.

They are racing to be the next distro. They want everyone to use their protocol, their platform, their tooling, build your audience on their systems. We don’t need more platforms or protocols or stacks. We already have a great one in ActivityPub.

Instead of making Nostr or BlueSky, they should have been making great apps that run on top of the ActivityPub protocol. It reminds me that there are no software experts anymore. Everyone changes software, apps, systems so frequently that no one really knows all the power they have already at their fingertips.

Just like how Slack, Discord, Matrix, and others, should have built their systems around XMPP, we should be building around ActivityPub.

2. Don’t listen to internet personalities

Call them whatever you want (creators, influencers, etc.), they want something that doesn’t fit with what you want. You just want to watch or read entertaining stuff. They want reach.

They want to reach as many people as possible, in the easiest and fastest means. Creators and Influencers want everyone is one place and can blast out their content to as many people as possible.

I know this well from being in marketing. It would have made my life so much easier if their was one place to post and advertise. The more platforms, the more complications. The more nuance I have to learn about each location. I have to learn the local language and culture.

Creators/Influencers want everyone to be in one place, with one culture, with one language. So of course they are going to try to convince people to consolidate to one place.

3. The switching costs

Cory Doctorow (and others) talk about switching costs a lot. And they do matter to a lot of people.

I have tried to convince my closest friends to give Mastodon a try and none of them will switch from Twitter. If they switch, they have to rebuild all their follows, lists, and likes. So, I’ve never been able to get them to even try it out.

Yet, every time one of these new platforms comes up they talk about them. They talk about them because they are looking for a direct 1:1 Twitter replacement. They don’t want to go through all the work of finding new people to follow or adjust to the existing culture of a platform.

Which is confusing to me because when they joined Twitter, they didn’t complain about how it wasn’t a 1:1 replacement for MySpace.

Diversity is better

Whatever happens with the explosion of new social media services, one thing is true: Diversity of the internet matters and makes it better.

The internet is better when there are dozens of sites we use and that we don’t all live in the same space. My son is in Twitch and Discord. My daughter is YouTube and Snapchat. My wife is newsletters. I’m Imgur, Mastodon, and blogs. No one has FOMO, everyone understands where we spend our time is unique to us and our friends.

Overall, I’m not pitching that should be on Mastodon. What I want is everyone to stop convincing each other of centralizing on as few platforms as possible. The web should be spread out and diverse. Screw FOMO, be where it makes you happy and you have fun, or wherever it is you want to be.

What we should be fighting for is interoperability. We shouldn’t need 50 logins and 15 apps, with our information siloed in each. These platforms are nothing without the content their users create. And that is not just for creators/influencers. All of us give these platforms content for free and then allow them to monetize it. Most of these companies are worth billions and they made that money off the backs of free labor from their users. We own that content and we should be able to share, post, and even transfer it anywhere we want.

This is why we shouldn’t be building new platforms. Instead, build on top of an existing open-source protocol that can interoperate and give the users ownership of their information. We have one, its ActivityPub.