Social Networks in 2030

The past, present and future of social networking.

Oct 16, 2024

Prediction: Social Networks of the 2030s, will be different to Social Networks of the 2020s, and in some ways, will come to slowly resemble the Social Networks of the mid 2000s and early 2010s.

In the last decade - the past five years especially - social apps have become more social media than social network. They’ve become more about discovery, and less about relationship. More about size, and less about connection. More about the algorithms, and less about the social graph.

Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, gave a fantastic talk on a similar thread at SXSW 2024, called “The Death of the Follower”:

I believe this will change over the coming decade, as people begin to crave community and connection again, and not just content consumption.

This doesn’t mean the multi billion user platforms run by algorithms will disappear. In fact, they will probably be larger and stronger than ever.

BUT…I predict that we will also see the rise of many, many niche and micro-social networks with a focus on relationships, communities and the social graph.

In fact, there will also be applications that do a mixture of both media/content/algorithm and network/community/social.

In this essay, I’d like to look at the history of Social Networks, how they started, how they’re going, what the evolution looked like and what the future will hold.

Social 1.0?

Social 1.0 has been about massive, billion+ user platforms. Think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn.

While there is certainly a variance in the kinds of users attracted to each, and also how they work, there are some underlying commonalities among them.

First of all, each of these Social 1.0 networks are platforms.

They are built in such a way that they own not only the content and data, but also the user’s identity (eg: your handle), the social graphs and connections (follows/following), and the algorithms that serve up the content (or censor it).

This is not a problem in and of itself. In fact, it worked extraordinarily well for the teams who built sticky-enough applications that fostered network effects and reached scale.

The problem however, arises later, when the platforms who basically own everything, lose the incentive to provide value, and instead need to find ways to keep people “locked in.” Turns out, the best way to lock people in is to push their dopamine buttons and hook them on content. In other words, when social-networks reach saturation, the only thing left to do is drive consumption.

This of course creates some perverse incentives. And since we are creative human beings after all, we find ways to game the incentives, resulting in the problematic state that social media finds itself in today: a big digital dopamine-dispenser, where the user, instead of being a client, becomes the product, and a slave to the algorithm.

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.”

-Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma Documentary

The second issue is the converging nature of all these social networks

Because they are siloed platforms, they cannot leverage content between each other. In the early days of social (pre-2010), there were open APIs all over the place and each social network bootstrapped off the other. Instagram bootstrapped both off Twitter and Facebook!

But, as the realisation dawned on each of them that their key asset was their users, they had to - economically-speaking - cut off access to others that might leech their user base. This is perfectly rational market behaviour, given the constraints they were working with. Your social network is valuable insofar as you have enough connections there to sustain it. If someone starts to suck your users away, it could destroy you. See MySpace and many others along the way.

So what happens here in time, is that all the feature set of all these platforms begin to, slowly by slowly, inch toward each other.

Instagram created the first real “influencers,” and since then every other social network copied. SnapChat created stories, basically everyone followed. TikTok came out and has since pushed almost every social network towards being more ‘social media’ by implicitly incentivising video. Now, almost every platform is doing some sort of video short.

Of course, the increase in internet bandwidth and device quality has gone hand in hand with this. Video is far more engaging and close to “real life” than simple photos or text are. But there’s something else that came with this. And that’s the more from being networks with a social graph, toward being essentially content engines. I will elaborate on this in a future essay.

The result of all this is a strange blend of excess redundancy and dependence on platforms which own your digital footprint.

I find myself these days, posting basically the same shit, across multiple social apps. Sure, there is some variance, but since everyone is increasingly getting on all of them, the audiences, while quite different in the early days, are slowly becoming the same.

This redundancy part, is something that platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite have taken full advantage of.

Other than the annoying redundancy, the dependence side of things involves me as a creator, trying to optimise all of my content for the algorithms, ie": for maximum engagement instead of maximum value, across all of these platforms. And worse, trying to do it such a way that doesn't get me banned, because my content, my social graph and my identity are owned by the platform, not by me.

Long term, what this does is both (a) waste a lot of time, and (b) make creators less interested in producing for their niche, and instead producing for a bunch of algorithms that are increasingly converging around appeal to a lowest-common-denominator of consooomer.

It’s a strange situation, that almost had to happen, but which we can change.

How and why did this happen?

Despite what the conspiracy theorists might believe, this was not all part of some premeditated agenda. These things are complex and emergent. Nobody had any clue what these platforms would come to be in the early days. Nobody had any idea Facebook would be used for marketplaces or that Instagram would change the very nature of travel, food and fashion. But they did, because they evolved, and did so in such a way that conspiring to use them became necessary.

Because Social 1.0 platforms are all companies, they are able to be “captured” - especially if they’re public. This is part of why Elon is such an important figure. He’s rich enough to not be entirely captured and he acts as somewhat of a bastion against the rot. That being said, this is not a viable long term solution to the problem, because one man is fragile, and the nature of the current paradigm and available building blocks is such that it will trend once more to centralisation, censorship and co-opting.

So if you want to know the real reason as to why we got here, it pretty much boils down to the building blocks that we had available. If you have mud all around you, don’t be surprised that the best structure you can build is a mud-hut.

This first round of social networks saw humans and human nature collide with an ‘internet’ that fundamentally lacked an identity layer, something the early pioneers were not ignorant about. The issue was that a viable implementation was never conceived - or at least, never broadly adopted. The internet stack only made it four layers deep:

What happened instead of a native digital identity for the web, was the creation of many identities owned by the actual applications built ON the internet. Instead of a protocol like TCP or IP, identity became a feature inside of a product. In fact, “logging in” is basically a feature, and your profile or identity are simply a database entry owned by whichever online product / service you signed up for. You have an identity with Amazon, with your bank, with your sales software, with Facebook, with Google and with every other online service.

This of course got very messy in time. We all ended up with a million and one identities, each requiring their own username and password. Not only that, but each online service became a honeypot full of private, identifying data that hackers love to exploit.

Some bandaid solutions arose to solve this problem. One was password managers (which we all hate). The other was SSO. Companies like Google and Facebook saw an opportunity here and being so broadly used developed Single Sign On (SSO) - and to some degree, they solved a big issue. It’s much easier to have a secure email set up with Google and just log in using SSO. The solution of course, comes with its very own problem, namely; Google/Facebook (insert SSO provider) ends up owning your identity, making you increasingly dependent on them.

This might be ok in a perfect world, but as you know, we live in an imperfect one. It’s very easy for Google to not only use that information to exploit you (selling your data, selling you shit, etc), but you can very easily get ‘cancelled’ or deplatformed.

While this is problematic with an email account, it even worse with a social account on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, because at least with your emails, you can own the list. On a social network, you could spend years building a following, an audience, a treasure trove of data and content - and then one day, be cancelled for saying or believing the wrong thing. Or perhaps even worse: become algorithmically irrelevant.

This is clearly a problem and one that has only become more prevalent since 2020. Celebrity chef Pete Evans, was de-platformed from Facebook and Instagram in 2020 after his public support for Trump and his opinion on the Covid-19 situation. Almost 2 million followers, gone overnight. The same has happened to countless other creators and online personalities who dared have an opinion in conflict with the mainstream narrative - I was one of them. My personal twitter account was perma-banned in 2021, right as my public profile began to take off because I dared question official narratives (although I created a new one).

So ultimately, we have a web stack that is ok, and got us quite far over the last 30-40 years - but comes with a unique set of problems, that are a function of the building blocks we’ve had to work with. I don’t believe there was a ‘master plan’ to get here, but there was no other option consider the ingredients we had. The only way to really handle identity, and later social, at scale, has thus far been with these constraints.

Hence why I call it Social 1.0, and why now, with the emergence of new technologies and new ways of managing your digital identity and footprint, we have an opportunity to build a new Social Web that doesn’t fall into the same trap as the first one did. We understand how people behave online much better than we did a decade or two ago. If we learn from the past, we can do things differently in the future. We can build something fundamentally new, and more importantly, better.

What is Social 2.0?

Social 2.0 is the term I’m giving to this very nascent but emerging new field of social networks that are smaller and more niche, and that are once again focusing on the connection between people, as opposed to the algorithmic content-recommendation engines. Some (not all) are leveraging the new building blocks that have emerged over the last five years.

In general, they are smaller, more community focused, and concentrate around a particular domain. This is a trend that is gaining traction, with a number of strong examples in various domains:

Cara: Basically an Instagram for artists
BlueSky: Basically Twitter for the Left
TruthSocial: Like Twitter for MAGA
New Public: Pluralist digital public spaces
Dribble: A social network for designers and digital artists
Primal: Like a Twitter meets Venmo that appeals to Bitcoiners
Farcaster: Kind of like Twitter, but for Crypto Degens, built on ETH
Ditto: Decentralised, self hosted, community-social networks
Highlighter: Like Patreon meets Substack for digital creators that want censorship resistance.

And of course there is Satlantis, which is essentially a Social Network for Sovereign Individuals. We are interested in the global community of people who live at the nexus of the following interests and domains:

Beyond their size and focus, the most interesting commonality, which in my opinion will become an ever-increasingly defining characteristic for Social 2.0 platforms, is that some of these (eg: Highlighter, Primal, Ditto and Satlantis) are all built atop a common social protocol: Nostr.

This is important because the identity and social graph do not live on the platform, but instead live on an underlying protocol - a bit like how your email lives on and is transmitted on the SMTP protocol.

This approach and what it implies could be the most significant upgrade to the web, perhaps since Web 2.0 really became a thing. If a robust, user-owned identity layer is adopted across the web, the entire topography of the internet will change, and so will the design space and the kinds of products which can be built.

Of course, the benefits it comes with, also bring some drawbacks, but in my opinion, they far outweigh the downsides. This is why I am so interested in the future of the social web, and the role Nostr in particular can play.

What is Nostr?

I will explain NOSTR (Notes and Other Things Transmitted by Relays) more in a dedicated future post, but for now, the following summary will do:

Nostr is a rich identity layer for the internet.
This identity is rich because you can append meta-data to it, for example, a profile photo, a description and perhaps most importantly, a list of follows and followers. This is what makes it a ‘social protocol,’ and not just native identity for the web.
This identity is also sovereign, meaning that it’s not “issued” by some platform or entity, but instead mathematically derived as a crypto-graphic key pair. Your private key is your ID, and your public key is your public address / username (how people find you). So long as you control the private key, you fully control your ID.
Unlike a blockchain, Nostr is stateless (like the internet) so it has the capacity to scale, and because it’s not money, it doesn’t need consensus. This avoids all the extra bloat that kills the usage of all other “crypto” and “blockchain” networks.
Storage is solved by the market. If you are posting data that might be censored, you can run your own relay (like a database) and ensure that it’s never taken down. If you’re posting non-sensitive content, you can very easily rely on the network of relays that the apps you’re using use. This is fine for 99% of use cases, and is abstracted away so nobody is impacted or annoyed.
It is very tightly linked to Bitcoin, the lightning network and other e-cash solutions, which make it “internet money native.” This is a huge benefit because commerce on the web will only want to grow, while the legacy digital banking infrastructure gets more stringent and draconian - so we need a plan B. Bitcoin solves that, and Nostr can scale without needing to shoehorn a token into it.
Like TCP/IP and SMTP, it is a protocol. This means it’s not owned by a single entity or company - making it much harder to capture.
As a new protocol layer, it upgrades the topography of the web, and opens up a design space that was not possible before. It’s a significant new building block for the web. Recall the earlier diagram depicting the current “internet stack.” With Nostr and Bitcoin, the internet stack gets a serious upgrade:

If you want to know more about Nostr, I recommend reading Lyn Alden’s piece on Nostr here: https://www.lynalden.com/the-power-of-nostr/

I also did a thorough X post explaining Nostr here: https://x.com/SvetskiWrites/status/1828403019081269661

There’s also a great post from my other Substack called Reviewing Reviews:

The Remnant Chronicles

Reviewing Reviews

Something a little out of the ordinary today, but thought it’s worth sharing here for anyone interested in the technical things I’m working on…

a year ago · 10 likes · Aleksandar Svetski

I will discuss Nostr in greater detail in future essays.

Comparing Social 1.0 and 2.0

Now that you have all of this context, let’s close out this essay with a quick comparison table between the two social paradigms:

As you can see, there are some general differences. And while I don’t show it to make the claim that one is good or the other is evil, I personally believe that Social 2.0 is technically and socially superior. It has better building blocks, and it’s the best shot we have at making the web more sovereign, independent and useful.

Also note:

These dichotomies are not hard rules. There’s a lot of both elements across all kinds of social networks, but broadly speaking Social 1.0 is larger, more about discovery than relationships, more about content consumption and more algorithmically driven than Social 2.0 will be.
The rise of Social 2.0 doesn’t mean social 1.0 will entirely disappear. In fact, part of the 2.0 movement implies that there will be both big and large social networks, and both protocol-connected and independent platform-enclosed social networks. In fact, there will also be blends of the two. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Threads, or maybe even X one day, leverage something like Nostr. Maybe they become “Nostr-compatible” so that people who have built profiles and audiences on Nostr, can easily port them over to X, while maintaining control.

It will be interesting to see how the future evolves, now that we have some new and unique building blocks. One thing I am certain of, is that the future will look different to the present, and I look forward to helping built it with Satlantis.

Thankyou for reading the first full essay on Social 2.0

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