To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
If I was the co-founder of one of the top websites in the world that had to pivot from my shitty news organization into what looks like a shitty version of Diaspora, I’m not so sure I’d be thrilled with “thousands.”
You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a piece of that or not), but just as Diaspora, Google+, Peach, Ello, App.net, Gab, Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this.
Snap was a threat to Facebook’s core messaging properties (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram), so Instagram had to blatantly copy Snap to win back momentum. Snap is still a thing, but unless it leans into the fact that it isn’t owned by Facebook (which is ultimately what hurts WA and Instagram), it isn’t ever going to catch-up, especially on a global level. TikTok has the sort of network effect Vine never had, and could be a real contender for the next generation, even with its ownership questions. Twitch and YouTube still have opportunities for growth — and there is still lots of room for innovation in the live video space.
And look, maybe this will be a really nice niche community for a small group of people. I hope it is. I hope the people that signup and pay for it enjoy it. I hope Wales doesn’t get bored when it doesn’t have tons of users and make tons of money.
There is a market for small community social networks. Not everything has to be the scale of Facebook — I’d argue it’s better when things aren’t that size — but let’s not pretend we’re not talking about this because it’s being positioned as something that is “taking on” the giant — when it would be more helpful - but make for a poorer headline/narrative - to say, “rich dude wants to recreate The Well for a generation of users who doesn’t know what The Well was.”
> Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this.
Who says that success should be measured by Twitter? It may be that no other social network approaches Twitter and Facebook in size given their dominance, but that doesn't mean that there can be no other social networks.
In my opinion, one-size-fits-all social was a mistake to begin with. Smaller niche spaces (like HN) are much more interesting.
To think of it another way: did your favorite local bistro "fail" as a restaurant because it didn't become as large as McDonald's? Which one would you rather eat at?
Absolutely agree. I hate this trend of measuring success by comparing small products to massive bloated giants of tech. You don't have to get to that level to be a success, and you're honestly probably better off if you don't.
Big social media companies are now seen as responsible for the destruction and compromise of democracy and have many more problems which wouldn't exist if they weren't so universally adopted.
I hope the future is full of many smaller niche social media sites that cater to a smaller group instead of trying to appeal to everyone.
The usefulness of a general "social network" is how many people it has. If I can't find almost everyone I know on it, and they are on a different platform (Facebook) it's easier for me to just use the other platform. People feel like they need it to keep in touch with others they don't see often (or even just others in general).
I personally don't have any major social media accounts, just small ones like HN - but I understand why people feel the need to use larger ones.
Are general social networks actually useful though? In mature markets, you have a huge chunk of people that have logged off Facebook permanently.
What matters is the people I want to interact with, and in Seattle they are on Mastodon. Not everyone needs to be on it, and frankly if close to everyone were on it you'd potentially drive away a good subset of users. That being said, by design I can retain my feed of friends on Mastodon without fear of some corporation or eternal spring of new users wrecking it.
A lot more common than logging off permanently is logging off except. I've logged off Facebook, except there are some Groups I'd be sad to lose touch with. For some people, they're off Facebook, except there are people they only contact through Messenger. Some are off Facebook except they like to see what Grandma says. As long as there's an 'except', Facebook still has that user.
> Are general social networks actually useful though
I'm not a big Facebook user, but my parents have been caught up in the bush fires currently raging in Australia and got cut off from power and internet (no power for satellite internet, and the mobile mast ran out of backup power), and finding a local Facebook group created to discuss the fires was fantastically helpful, I got in touch with their rural route mailman and people in the local village and found a bunch of good local news sources.
In comparison there was nearly nothing on Twitter (one Sydney reporter who was tweeting from her dispatch for two or three days). Main-stream news sites were utterly useless with no detail in their reports. Without Facebook I would have had drastically less information and more worry.
This all happened once before. Compuserve, AOL, prodigy, all had mail systems that were walled gardens. Eventually gateways were established. When the users want it it will happen.
I remember MySpace being a place where I could explore the ideas I wanted with people all over the world.
There was a clear, forum-inherited structure to most groups. It kept me coming back, day after day.
Google+ had a similar appeal - I dont know you, I dont care. I like what you have to offer, so I'm getting to know you.
Bridging that into meatspace relationships by frontloading them first? Was straining - I realized how little my peers cared for what they even do. Flooding that feed with game-spam? Negated the premise. And turning it into infinite-scroll of bad takes to drive engagement just turned me temporarily, but deeply misanthropic.
Turning online into afk relationships and friendships made all of this worthwhile. Facebook had that for a bit with their "events" features... But those got nerfed into being useless without an advertising firm's budget.
I, for one? Am happy to join somewhere that respects my time.
Mastodon is successful for sure, but it isn't successful enough to overcome the incumbent in the space, which is what we're talking about. That isn't a bad thing, but it's important to add that context when looking at anything else that is being heralded as "the next X."
That's literally why I added the caveat of saying "Mastodon isn't a failure" -- but it hasn't overcome the incumbent and it won't and that may not have been the goal, but that is certainly the story that was told/sold "this OSS de-centralized app is going to replace Twitter," if not by the founders, than by the press/people excited by the idea.
To think in terms of there even being a next "incumbent in the space" implies a misunderstanding of what is driving Mastodon adoption.
The differentiator behind Mastodon is federation via the ActivityPub protocol. And Mastodon is just one implementation of ActivityPub. More are being built every day.
It's likely that a world with ubiquitous ActivityPub would look very different from the social media landscape of today -- Mastodon is a little like Twitter, Pixelfed is a little like Instagram, Peertube is a little like Youtube, but they all syndicate their content to each other. So as ActivityPub grows the conventional categories blur. What happens if WordPress decides to add ActivityPub support to the Core?
I can't read the future but I think the real metric to look at is ActivityPub adoption. No one is tracking it very well right now to my knowledge. And if it hits a certain critical mass I think it will start to reconfigure the current categories of social media. It will also bring down barriers to entry which may discourage the rise of incumbents similar to today's crop.
I love the idea of ActivityPub, but in practice, I think the very complex protocol, which is built on top of JSON-LD (I still don't understand why) of all things, and accepts variable structures for many, if not most fields, which makes it cumbersome to (de)serialize in languages with static typing, will hurt adoption by new projects.
My main gripe with it is that potentially writing a spec-compliant server in an enterprise-y language like Java almost feels like a fool's errand (I tried it in Dart, which is very Java-esque).
On that note, I don't even think that the main focus should be on which protocol is used, but rather the features of platforms in the "fediverse," and reasons other than the blanket term "privacy" that the average person would consider switching.
There are tons of differing implementations like PeerTube, PixelFed (Instagram-esque), Lemmy (Federated Reddit/HN), Write.as (great for blogging on the fediverse and closed platforms at the same time), Pleroma, etc
> Mastodon is successful for sure, but it isn't successful enough to overcome the incumbent in the space, which is what we're talking about. That isn't a bad thing, but it's important to add that context when looking at anything else that is being heralded as "the next X."
Are we talking about that? I don't think so... why must everyone "overcome" the incumbent?
Sure, Facebook is the goto for "general purpose" social networking between friends and family. On the other hand, Facebook is terrible for following and discussing the news, unless you like a huge heap of bias and low-quality clickbait. WT Social is planning to address that niche. Facebook is also terrible if you want to keep up with a huge volume of tech news and follow interesting discussions on those topics with lots of expert contributors. HN fills that niche, but sometimes there is too much politics here, so Lobste.rs exists for people who prefer smaller, more focused conversation.
The "long tail" in the social space is huge. Not every venture needs or wants to be the next Amazon in its space.
> if not by the founders, than by the press/people excited by the idea.
And that's the problem. The press doesn't know what they are talking about.
While I absolutely agree that niche spaces that fit your interests tend to have much higher content quality, this argument doesn't quite apply to social networks that attach to your IRL persona. No point in switching until most your IRL connections are there.
In this case, if all your friends hang out at McDonalds, you're not gonna want to sit at your local bistro alone.
I'm not sure that a large network is essential. A strong niche is. Owning the market in an influential niche can be enough. Facebook's rise came from universities.
It seems unlikely that this particular new network will succeed, but if it provides value to a tight-knit set of users, it can plant roots and grow.
Maybe, but then you have a different financial model being played out with it being subscritpion based and no small fee either. This changes how it can be marketed and the pyrimid approach would not supprise me in that once the subscriptions level of, they offer them referal links in which they get $1 a month for people subscribing via their link after their extended trial period of say 90 days.
At least, that is what I would be looking at doing. Certainly the monthly fee is high, so what level they break even in running costs will be lower and may well be that they already break even in running and depreciation of assets -costs. May even be a small monthly profit already. We just don't know.
It would be a social network that excludes the poor and the frugal.
It reminds me of a network that was created for the extreme rich, a few years ago. On searching for it, I find that there have been several such created: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/09/social-networks-for-...
That was written in 2014, so perhaps there are more since then.
A lots of this is true. I can only debate what networks need to have. Facebook became popular not because social effect but because it used "on behalf" emails to spam friends of users with optout error by design and because of automated scraping emails from an email account when user got lured to give login and password. Than it was new, now these things have special words to describe it.
Isn't he controlling the throttle with limited "free" signups and the pricing to go around it? A assume he must be happy since he's controlling the growth rate. It's not clear how fast it would be growing without a throttle on "free".
Both sides are in the wrong. Comparing the numbers of the first few days to Facebook suggests either ill intent or willful ignorance, while praising a new start-up as a Facebook rival without baking up that claim with some relatable rationale indicates bias or an agenda.
Facebook aims to cover anyone's every need which could come up in a social interaction or how communication could occur. In other words, FB is a communication, an entertainment and a business platform.
WT:Social, on the other hand, seems to be an evolution of the WikiTribune diving into the social market world, yet continuing its focus on reporting and fact-based information sharing. This involves work which isn't all too appealing to the general public.
Seriously. Mastodon started at thousands. People wrote articles insisting it would never go anywhere. It's still growing with thousands of instances for every sort of community three years after the dismissive op-eds started, and it didn't have the benefit of a major profile promoting it.
The largest Mastodon instance is full of content that isn't exactly allowed on traditional social media (i.e. lolicon). I don't think WT:Social will have the same competitive advantage.
Technically speaking, the largest Mastodon instance is full of content that isn't exactly allowed on traditional social media (i.e. far-right extremism). See https://fediverse.network/
It depends how well the blocking features will be advertised. "Lots of extremists have converged at xxx.social. You can block them all in one go." sounds better to me than what's happening in Twitter.
Agreed, federated instance is a way better solution than Twitter blocklists. In fact, I think Mastodon was designed to combat such extremists from day one, so even with the alt-right’s foray into the fediverse things will go at least better than Twitter.
I hear you but Facebook, for better or worse, is the social networking site everyone you know is on. It has a tremendous advantage over any upstart for that reason. Lots of geeky folks flocked to Google+ in its early days but that wasn't enough to replace Facebook. Even when they gave everyone who had a Google account of some kind a G+ profile it still wasn't enough. I will definitely check this out but it'll be back to FB when I need to know what my friends are up to.
Google+ always had a weird broken interface and they just never finished it. I was one of the geeks that flocked to it, and had plenty of friends there. It didn't fail because of network effects, it failed because they stopped working on it before it was finished.
It was really strange and I always assumed at the time that Facebook and Google had come to some agreement behind the scenes.
It really was strange, continues to be, the way Google wanders away from products before finishing them.
I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? From inside Google at the time, the general consensus was that they cared too much about it, at the cost of much of the rest of the company.
From the outside it appeared to be a bare framework that was never fully developed.
I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence.
There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaboration with the community.
Meanwhile there were significant influencers and content producers with large numbers of followers. The dream of any social media company.
I always assumed it folded because they couldn't agree on a path to monetization.
But from the perspective that they actually did care about it (which I read as they devoted significant resources to it even if that didn't translate to anything that was publicly visible)... It starts to sound more like a company that's hit the self hobbling critical mass of size and internal bureaucracy.
People were generally pretty irritated (as was the public) by the integration of every Google product into it. Leadership (both internally and externally) was pretty clear that it was meant to be a platform, one that unified all of Google's products with a shared social layer.
I worked in research at the time and have never been a heavy social media user, so it didn't really affect me much, but the internal story seems to fit reality more than what you're describing: the change in user facing functionality was progressive integration of Google products (like YouTube)
And Google broke their social network that was actually working (Google Reader), hoping that the now "homeless" users would flock to Google+.
I don't know why they thought that this kind of bullshit would work on "techies" (the core audience of Google Reader) - that just made them wake up and realize that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was a sham...
> the social networking site everyone you know is on
As for Facebook the site, this is less and less true. I have kids cross different age ranges, and Facebook is not a thing at all for any of them or their social groups. And whenever someone wants to organize things via Facebook, there is always a lot of pushback from people who don't/won't use it.
Their other properties, Whatsapp and Instagram, are very popular, but they serve slightly different functions. So either there is a vacuum left from Facebook (the site), or the market has simply shifted and no longer wants a MySpace/Facebook type platform.
As another experience, I've yet to meet someone aged 20 and up that doesn't have Facebook neither in Texas nor Mexico and I'm meeting people constantly 20-40.
I'm sure they have Whatsapp, Instagram, and other apps, but I've never met someone who couldn't at least provide a Facebook profile when asked and then communicate with me on it.
It seems hard to draw on your kids' experiences until they at least enter university or the work force and are actually meeting new people. I never had a Snapchat until a cute woman asked me if I had one. Now I have one ready to go.
Facebook wasn't even available until I entered university, but that's also when the rolodex becomes useful. Not so much in highschool where, even in my massive school, I still wasn't meeting so many people nor had much control over my social life compared to uni.
So I'm wary of people extrapolating from what kids do. People have been saying the death of FB is just around the corner, "just look at what kids use" for years.
Of course, a lot of this also depends where you live, like how Americans will use iMessage while that's basically unheard of in other parts of the world.
I agree with everything you said, but I still think "thousands" is way too low for newsworthiness. Social networks need a critical mass before they are good for anything. Surely that number has to be in the millions, right?
Well, Twitter was seen as a failure in 2009 compared to Facebook at the time. What constitutes to mass adoption is if several so-called 'influencers' try it out and if they make more money on the platform than both Twitter/Facebook and if the social network allows advertisers on there too. Then the millions of users will follow suit. Its that simple and it is has worked for Snap and it is working for TikTok.
If there is no gain or incentive for the famous users or the so called 'influencers', then the 'millions of users' will stay where the famous users are.
The "critical" mass however doesn't refer to absolute numbers. A million users with no relation to each other don't make it work. A few thousand with a tight network relationship cn make a busy place.
The metric relevant for social network sustainable growth seem unlikely to be total user count. It’s probably a mixture of metrics around inter-connectivity and rate of adjacent edge growth.
You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a piece of that or not), but just as Diaspora, Google+, Peach, Ello, App.net, Gab, Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this.
Snap was a threat to Facebook’s core messaging properties (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram), so Instagram had to blatantly copy Snap to win back momentum. Snap is still a thing, but unless it leans into the fact that it isn’t owned by Facebook (which is ultimately what hurts WA and Instagram), it isn’t ever going to catch-up, especially on a global level. TikTok has the sort of network effect Vine never had, and could be a real contender for the next generation, even with its ownership questions. Twitch and YouTube still have opportunities for growth — and there is still lots of room for innovation in the live video space.
And look, maybe this will be a really nice niche community for a small group of people. I hope it is. I hope the people that signup and pay for it enjoy it. I hope Wales doesn’t get bored when it doesn’t have tons of users and make tons of money.
There is a market for small community social networks. Not everything has to be the scale of Facebook — I’d argue it’s better when things aren’t that size — but let’s not pretend we’re not talking about this because it’s being positioned as something that is “taking on” the giant — when it would be more helpful - but make for a poorer headline/narrative - to say, “rich dude wants to recreate The Well for a generation of users who doesn’t know what The Well was.”