Beyond the Walled Gardens: Exploring the Evolution of Social Media, from Centralization to Decentralized Protocols
The race to developing the most interoperable social media platform just started
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The social media giants have entered in the arena and no one will leave without having the touchdown of their life. They’ve been preparing for this battle for months and now, they can’t let this opportunity go to waste. All the rigorous hours spent developing clever algorithms, testing out new things, and tapping a booming market. This is the dawn of something new: Interoperable Social Media! But most importantly, we as spectators are lined up to get in on the most shiny and trendy thing. Strings are attached but we don’t care and our pockets are full of money to throw at everything that sparkles. These giants are feeding on just that and won’t stop doing so. Your attention is what they crave.
This is a strategy, where you stumble, the other gains big time. Recently, the steps taken by Elon Musk regarding Twitter have raised eyebrows across the social media industry. While some have blatantly criticized the management of the platform others have retorted to other competitor applications. One sneaky competitor watching everything from the sidelines and waiting to find the best opportunity to hunt has been Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Developing in the shadows, gaining public confidence, making it streamline, and then coming on up-front to challenge the already established brand. All the circumstances for the introduction of Threads, Meta’s version of Twitter, have been ideal.
What went wrong with Twitter?
Unfortunately, Twitter has been an overall unprofitable company. Jack Dorsey might have recognized its future potential and deemed it fit to join the decentralized army in developing open software, where Damus comes in, holding the flag of Bitcoin sky-high. After his resignation, Elon Musk, known for his fiery claims and bragging nature identified the importance of Twitter and how it fuels his dominance. Everyone is in it for their recognition, it boils down to this no matter how rosy the situation looks like. Well, Elon privatized the company with a hefty price of $44 billion and took the steering into his own hands.
Initially, Elon blamed the management of the company for its unprofitability and laid off a record number of employees. Alas, Twitter gained a spot in the list of companies cutting their teams in the layoff season. Elon didn’t stop there. For the company to make money, the crucial step which would later dictate Twitter’s demise was taken. This is the introduction of a paywall for the verification mark in front of your profile. Anyone paying $8 a month would be included in the verified list making it a subscription service lacking its due diligence. This led to many companies being impersonated by malicious actors. The most prominent of them was the decline in the stock price of Eli Lily and Company because of a significant announcement on Twitter that insulin will be free. The company later had to clarify that it was being impersonated.
Now, this has made advertisers on the platform wary of the operations ultimately diverting their attention towards other platforms. Twitter has made its mark as the Times Square of social media with its unique way of micro-blogging. However, there is an inherent flaw in the way operations are carried out. This flaw is the immense amount of centralization in managing the affairs of the company. The final blow to the company’s reputation after which a majority of users see the end comes when the amount of tweets a person can view has been capped. This is to reduce the number of scammers and bot accounts which has been a problem highlighted from the start by Elon during his acquisition of Twitter. Also, shockingly, it has been done to hamper data acquisition by machine learning bots feeding onto data. It is a race for data, and AI isn’t stopping.
It is in the best interest of Twitter management and the advertisers, the main source of revenue. But the ones getting hurt are the consumers who are ultimately left to the mercy of the decisions of a selected few board members deeming their opinion as incompetent.
Mastodon: the silent breakthrough
Talking about Twitter competitors, the platform that has gained a serious amount of traction has been Mastodon. The technology underlying the platform named ActivityPub is of great importance to the way social media will be shaped ahead. This is because it allows the user to control the data taking their followers, posts, and audience with them wherever they go. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone. It's a free open-source platform, originally launched in 2016 by developer Eugen Rochko, and it's made up of many different instances, or servers, instead of being managed by one company on one domain name.
“I was there in the early days of the web, and this whole thing with ActivityPub is as big a deal as HTML was back then. This is the single biggest opportunity I’ve seen for the web since the dawn of the web.”
Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard
After Elon took over Twitter, many users flocked to competitor apps. Mastodon stood out because of its decentralized nature and user autonomy. Mastodon operates in the form of instances in the “fediverse”. Instances are servers on which you have to sign up. There is no single server rather it is decentralized enough that anyone can operate it from his or her room. Hence, this eradicates a single point of failure. The collection of these instances is called the fediverse. It can be understood by considering the federated states of America as an analogy. Each federal state is independent on its own and all such states are collected under the united federation as Mastadon acts as a country for all the independent instances.
When you sign up for an instance that becomes a part of your username and you can see all the “toots”(similar to tweets) posted in that instance. An administrator runs the instance. Most of the instances are run as non-profit or receive support from sites like Patreon. The most popular instance is mastodon.online, which is also administered by the service's founder. Mastodon can feel like a ghost town once you sign up but here are several directories that list interesting people to follow.
Whenever you send an e-mail, do you make a different account for g-mail, Hotmail, or Yahoo whenever the recipient has a different e-mail belonging to these? No! This is because the underlying protocol is the same for sending and receiving e-mails whereas the platforms by which you access the protocol changes adding to user functionality and ease. Similarly, ActivityPub serves as a breakthrough such that it provides a protocol on which a user may construct his social profile. The data is stored on servers and can easily be shifted to any other platform that supports the protocol. This is what Threads by Meta aims to be: a platform supporting the ActivityPub protocol to make the user uniquely access his social profile.
Zuckerberg knows how to play
Mark Zuckerberg has a history of developing social media apps since he was a teen and on the other side of the ring, we have Elon Musk who has a reputation for overstating and then trying to deliver according to that not neglecting his ability to hunt down some of the best men in the industry on-board. Mark has positioned the launch of Threads so nicely that it cannot be something not well-thought of beforehand. The cage fight between Elon and Mark, identifying Twitter’s flaws and finding the gap in the micro-blogging space to fit his own goal perfectly. Musk just ends up suing Mark for copying Twitter and allegations of using the inner workings of the company to develop his platform through the hiring of ex-employees at Twitter which Meta denies.
The trajectory that Twitter has taken is in it for its downfall. A clear indication to control most of what users do is a red flag in itself. Mark has been doing that for a long but hasn’t openly made the user uncomfortable while using all of Meta’s apps. This data gained after signing up on Meta’s apps is used to such an extent that algorithms are curated to fit the user best and his decisions are influenced by the type of content he is shown. When the user feels uneasy, he abandons the network and flocks to the next shiny thing in the market. Remember MySpace, well such platforms die out if the network effect fades away. Meta has flourished in the social media realm because of this one fact, it has maintained ease of user sign-up and infected minds with its network. Like Threads is easy to sign up using your already present Instagram account. With Instagram having billions of users, an audience is well-made to adopt this new shiny thing as well.
Constructing paywalls, the need to stay in business
The traditional social media space has been a set of walled gardens where each brand functions on its own giving a new way of interacting with others. This has been the scheme to make profits, and construct walls so that money stays confined to the company and the user base remains restricted with the data. However, emerging trends and the awareness of decentralized software and its benefits open users to the possibility of a wide variety of apps. There will be plenty of competition in the race to reinvent social media: social upstarts like Artifact and Substack Notes are building their closed platforms, and Bluesky, Farcaster, Nostr, and others are building their open protocols that also aim to decentralize social networking entirely.
ActivityPub is far from perfect. It is not the one-stop solution for what the next-generation social media protocol looks like. However, Mastadon and the underlying ActivityPub protocol are crucial in defining the direction of the next big thing. On Nov. 7, Mastodon founder Rochko tooted that there were over 1 million monthly active users of the service. That's still a lot lower than the over 245 million daily active users of Twitter that CEO Elon Musk tweeted about. However, this is a milestone that the decentralized ecosystem is capable of. Flipboard and Medium are on board with the idea of a decentralized ecosystem. It’s like Linux and Microsoft. Everyone is comfortable with the fact that Microsoft steals your data and Linux is there for anyone a little more knowledgeable to know its benefits. There are decentralized alternatives to almost every popular centralized service on the web. Like we have Pixelfed in place of Instagram and PeerTube in place of Youtube.
The stunt undertaken by Mark is also something spectacular. Making money off federated social media is difficult as today’s companies capitalize on data and if that is decentralized, where will they get their profits? Also, ActivityPub is difficult to understand and use for the common user, another hurdle to mass adoption.
Will Threads do something different or is it just another “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy where the open protocol is abandoned calling it sturdy after new and attractive features are introduced in the app? Time will tell but a future where apps like Mastanode co-exist is a nice future.