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<title>Can we have a more “social” media?</title>
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<h1>Can we have a more “social” media?</h1>
<p class="meta">2026-03-24</p>
<hr>
<h2>Social media is far from human social interactions</h2>
<p>I'm noticing more and more that the patterns “social” media provides
are not the patterns we need or want for human-centered social media.</p>
<p>Some examples come to mind:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Endless scrolling</dt>
<dd>Real human connection is dependent on spontaneous interactions,
with a limit of attention and mental energy. Things don't happen without bounds.</dd>
<dt>Structured conversation</dt>
<dd>Humans don't structure their interactions: patterns and
context switching emerge naturally.</dd>
<dt>Strongly asynchronous, turn-based interactions with strangers</dt>
<dd>Seem to bring out the worst in people, you neither have a real conversation,
nor a shared common ground, and usually <em>anyone</em> can “slide in your mentions”
even if their intentions are disruptive. Real social spaces are moderated
by familiarity, and the amount of onlookers or new participants is usually
pretty small.</dd>
<dt>Indefinite publicity</dt>
<dd>Humanly-scaled spaces tend to forget, beyond the interpersonal. The internet
is forever, screenshots of your posts will be shared in ways you didn't intend to.</dd>
</dl>
<p>“If you don’t know why something is, follow the money.”<br>
Let’s analyze the structure of existing social media in this fashion:
Assume that everything is made for maximal monetization.
How are current social media platforms monetized?
The answer is <em>advertising</em>.</p>
<p>When you ask “Why was this technical decision made?”
what you are really asking is: “How does this feature serve advertisers?”.
Try it.</p>
<h2>The Fediverse does (not) serve advertisers</h2>
<p>Now, an obvious question comes to mind: If mostly every “social” media feature
is a direct or indirect result of serving the advertising business model,
why is so much of the Fediverse a direct clone of the features of these platforms?</p>
<ul>
<li>Mastodon is more-or-less a direct clone of Twitter</li>
<li>Pixelfed tries to emulate Instagram</li>
<li>Peer<em>tube</em> even has You<em>tube</em> in its name</li>
</ul>
<p>and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>I understand that in order to get people away from the places that are damaging
to them, we should first provide an alternative that feels familiar.</p>
<p>I posit that we have <em>done</em> that, and the big storm of people into the fediverse
has not happened, and probably will not ever happen. They will always choose a
“Bluesky” over a “Mastodon”, simply because advertisers are the best at the task of creating an advertising platform.</p>
<h2>We can (not) advance</h2>
<p>So where does this leave us, as activists, technologists, and <em>dreamers</em>?</p>
<p>First off, I think it’s incredibly freeing. We have a license to try new things!
We can come up with new ideas in small groups, driven by the actual wants and needs
of us as the wider fediverse, small friend groups, and individual human beings.</p>
<p>And best of all: <strong>advertisers are not our masters, and scaling is not our dogma!</strong></p>
<p>However, there is always pressure to conform, to “just” implement “that
feature that platform X (YZ) has”, “and wouldn’t it be nice if?”.
Instead we should find <em>new ways</em>, ways that actually put the <em>social</em>
back into <em>social</em> media.</p>
<p>I hope this post gives some of you the space to take a step back,
think through the implications of implementing some new idea.
Is it coming from a place of »trying to keep up«, or from a place
of true love for the people who are going to use your work in their
daily lives?</p>
<h2>A modest first step</h2>
<p>Okay, enough of this appeal-to-emotion hogwash, here’s a first idea I’ve had:
We have this concept of <em>actors</em>, which maps relatively straightforward to an
“account”, which in turn speaks “with the voice” of one person.</p>
<p>On the other side, we have “hashtags”, which are an open-form way of looking
at a stream of related posts. Those are inspired directly from twitter and similar
tag implementations.</p>
<aside>
<p>Let’s analyze this for a second: Hashtags came from a community convention
on the early, small Twitter. But the fact that they cannot <em>ever</em>
scale to the size of a global open network means they will not work without
some sort of algorithmic pre-filtering. We also have the issue of the impossibility
of content moderation. For example, the <code>#motorcycle</code> hashtag will regularly
host posts of gay erotic/pornographic material. This is the prime example of a
feature that does not enable “human scale” discovery, and will never work once
the network gets too big.</p>
</aside>
<p>What hasn’t been considered is the ability of multiple people to speak with
“one voice” yet.<br>
First, I will post things of vastly different nature to my account,
ranging from programming topics to the political, or I will just post cute
pictures or funny things I see on X (yes, unfortunately all the truly funny people
are still on there …).<br>
Second, other people might want to see only my
programming-related stuff, and don’t much care for my political commentary.<br>
Lastly, I know some people whom I know to also have very interesting takes
on programming. I want them to fill my timeline with nice programming-related
posts which don’t even mention any of the current crazes that hackernews
and most of the blogosphere are circling around.</p>
<p>My current solution here is a kind of <code>boost-bot</code>, where multiple
people can be curators of a single activitypub actor, boosting posts as “one voice”
if you will. The admin can add people as curators, and they will be able to sign
in via DM from their fediverse handle.</p>
<aside>
<p>Remind me to write a blog post on how to implement this “log-in from fediverse”
feature I call <code>FediAuth</code>.</p>
</aside>
<p>I have a first such community-curated bot up at
<code><a href="https://mastodon.xyz/@happy-programming@happy.softwaregardening.org">@happy-programming@happy.softwaregardening.org</a></code>
(<a href="https://sources.profpatsch.de/Profpatsch/users/Profpatsch/booster-bot/">src</a>),
and I hope it can add a new dimension to how we communicate on the fediverse,
ideally a more “human” one.</p>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<ol>
<li>Existing social media platforms are designed through the necessities of advertising</li>
<li>The ads model makes them scale, but it is also a cancer on human interaction</li>
<li>Can we <em>please</em> build a new social web without those restrictions, thank you</li>
</ol>
<h2>Further Reading</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://coding.social/blog/shared-ownership">Shared responsible social web ownership</a>
<span class="author">by <a href="https://social.coop/@smallcircles">Arnold Schrijver</a></span>,
on social engineering, and how we should deal with big actors co-opting our work.
I'd say based on the above we should first of all not copy structures that can be
easily monetized by advertisers and their ilk.</li>
<li><a href="https://evilmaid.net/blog/trusting-trust-fediverse/index.html">Trusting Trust in the Fediverse</a>
<span class="author">by <a href="https://fluffytail.org/users/phnt">Evil Maid</a></span>,
gives a good technical overview of how the public nature of our infrastructure
makes building (semi-)private structures incredibly hard.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Further Thinking</h2>
<ul>
<li>If we don't have big centralized advertising supporting our resource spend,
can we maybe finally create a way to give people money?
Microtransactions over activitypub? via <a href="https://www.taler.net/">GNU Taler</a>?
backed by <a href="https://liberapay.com/">liberapay</a> or something similar?</li>
<li>Can we default to private groups instead of everything-public-by-default? Can we make it <em>cozy</em>?</li>
<li>Can we subvert the ownership-and-attribution model somehow? Can we make it <em>collective</em>?</li>
<li>What about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need">human needs</a>?
How do our platforms interact with them?
Do they improve some aspect of the more fundamental needs? <em>Can</em> they?</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://mastodon.xyz/@Profpatsch/116286505445503914">Discuss on the Fediverse</a></p>
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