[flir]

I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.

Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.

[Yokohiii]

Interesting. Each time I think about how we could reboot the (social) web I have this on mind. I don't want exposure to everything, so kind of whitelisting the contacts/peoples/blogs is the first thought. I guess it could work to carve your own cozy echo chamber that once in a while lets something new in. The conflict I cannot penetrate is that some things (could) need a larger exposure surface. I.e. OS projects, maintainers that will naturally generate a large following. There are also individuals that want to maximize exposure, mostly for the sake of it. The latter could be neglected but the former not. That leaves an natural backdoor to turn any networking into the same cesspools we have right now.

I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.

[couscouspie]

It seems like many people have the same or similar ideas. I was thinking of using a tool similar to bookmark-managers as the foundation of a new web. Where you subscribe to RSS-feeds of specific (or clusters of) people to specific topics as the "follow" primitive and you publish your own feed(s), which bookmark-managers btw. already allow. The missing pieces are commenting on the feeds of friends and a layer of federated ML for ranking, which the user controls by simple sliders that set the mark for dimensions like retrieval-vs-discovery, hightrust-vs-highnovelty, recency-vs-trendingimpetus and so on.

[landdate]

The few niche social media websites I have seen able to prevent rapid deterioration in quality without dying in active user count typically have a high barrier of entry. Reminds me evilzone one of the few decent hacking websites on the clearnet that actually had a decent community. They had some challenge you had to complete I can't even remember what it was, but it prevented new users from joining unless they could solve it. Was very simple iirc but it stopped large amount of the skids/hf peeps.

[flir]

Walls are fundamental to my prediction. So not so much "web" as "forum". Discord, not Facebook.

I guess it's the gatekeeping mechanism that's going to be the interesting bit.