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By now, just about everyone agrees that social media is somehow broken. Users constantly complain about the overall user experience. Advertisers complain about the whole “pay-to-play” model to get their ads in front of users. And the social media giants themselves are under tremendous pressure from legislators, regulators, and consumer advocates over their business practices.
Right now, X (formerly Twitter) has become the poster child for everything that’s wrong with social media. X wants users to pay for subscriptions and premium features, but users want everything to be free. Advertisers complain that their content is being shown next to hate speech and misinformation. And both lawmakers and regulators are concerned that X has failed in its content moderation duties.
A new business model for social media?
Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps no surprise that people are searching for answers. And one of the best answers to date seems to involve a more open, decentralized business model. The key to this business model is a social networking protocol known as ActivityPub.
According to some, ActivityPub is the Next Big Thing in social networking. The core idea of ActivityPub is very attractive for many social media users. In short, ActivityPub says you should be able to take your social media content and followers with you, wherever you go on the internet. Your entire social media experience shouldn’t be a set of different walled gardens, each one controlled by a different mega-corporation and accessible only via an app.
So the idea of ActivityPub is to take your social graph and your content, and make it instantly portable and interoperable wherever you go on the internet. If you decide to post content on Facebook, that content should be available on X. If you want to start afresh on a new social networking site, you should be able to pull in your followers from, say, Instagram or TikTok.
According to backers of ActivityPub, this new social networking protocol will make social media seem a lot more like email. Think about it for a second – when you send an email to someone in your social circle, do you even care which email provider they use? Do you care if they are viewing the email on a mobile device or a laptop? Do you even question the idea of sending an email from an Apple user to a Microsoft user?
No, of course not. It’s all so seamless that it just seems to work. All the hard work of making sure that everyone can talk to everyone else is completely abstracted away. The same thing should be true for social media. It shouldn’t matter that I’m on Facebook, you’re on X, and our mutual friend is on Instagram.
But will it work?
That sounds great in theory. It’s a utopian vision of social media that sounds very appealing. The problem, though, is that this concept of a new social networking protocol really doesn’t seem to be gaining too much traction. As noted above, the protocol has been around since 2018, and the best use case we have to date is Mastodon, which is often described as a “decentralized Twitter.” A better description might be: “a Twitter wannabe with fewer users.”
Granted, a few big names – such as Medium, Mozilla, and WordPress – appear to be behind ActivityPub, but decentralized social media seems like such a difficult concept to explain to the average internet user. Is it really worth the effort?
Moreover, as much as users might want a vast, decentralized model for social media, big corporations probably don’t. They have money at stake, after all. How are they possibly going to attract advertising dollars if advertisers can’t even be certain where certain content will end up appearing? Why would they pay a premium for, say, placing ads on Facebook, when Facebook is really the same platform as everything else out there in social media land? In short, big corporations love walled gardens. It’s what makes them rich.
Yes, social media is broken. But I’m not sure it’s just the plumbing system (i.e. the social networking protocols) that needs to be fixed. Maybe the whole house needs to be razed to the ground, so that people can build an entirely new scaffolding for the social web. Instead of just tweaking the existing business model, maybe it requires creating an entirely new one from scratch.
