The State of the Open Social Web

[usonian]

Posted in GD and not computers for general interest. We all want alternatives to right wing antisocial sites.

https://werd.io/the-state-of-the-open-social-web/

A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.

I’m not new to this space, or an impartial observer: I co-founded Elgg, one of the first open source social networking platforms, over twenty years ago. It was used by governments, Fortune 500 companies, global NGOs, and universities, and embraced early open standards. Known, a social publishing platform I co-founded, was used by media companies to build award-winning communities. And I’m on the board of A New Social, a non-profit dedicated to bridging open social platforms.

What is the open social web?
When you think of social media, many of the platforms you think of are what we call proprietary: their underlying software is private to the companies that build them, and it’s very difficult to move your data or your connections anywhere else. They are, in a very real way, closed. The indie web movement goes so far as to call them silos.

snip

Proprietary silos each have an owner that can, ultimately, do what it wants with them. At best, that can mean that users receive content through curated feeds that might suppress certain kinds of content (including links to certain publishers) and promote others. At worst, it means that traffic and reach could disappear at any time.

In contrast, open social web platforms are designed not to be silos. While each platform is built by a core vendor or community, they run on open protocols that anyone can build software for.

Pretty comprehensive but not too technical look at the alternatives, and how they differ.

[hunter]

1. Has "social media" itself been a positive force in our society?

I'm not sure it has.

Facebook, the site formerly known as twitter, Bluesky, etc., simply don't exist in my personal universe.

DU itself borders on being too noisy for me.

It's possible I'm not a social person.

[usonian]

2. "Social" sites stopped being social when they introduced news feeds to further addict users.

Ads were bad enough.

I avoid them all. I heavily filter DU for noisiness (I avoid a lot of heavily trafficked forums, just for the time involved) and I use Hacker News, which I skim. Not social at all. It's techie-oriented.

The only remaining and the original social network is email. (once you cut out the spam)

Being social, to me, exists within trusted contexts. We can't maintain any kind of relationship with more than 150 people, Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

That, quite simply, is too few to exploit.

But it should be the basis of any *real* social networking.