The Open Social Web

This is my initial blog post - mostly here so I can set up my blog site without an empty PDS. To that end, here are some high-level thoughts on a topic that’s been top of mind for me for a while: The Open Social Web.

I’ve only really been aware of this whole open social concept for about 2 years, so I sometimes feel late to the party. But since then I've dived deep into the weeds of the protocols, ecosystems and communities. I've spent many many hours in discussions around implementations and design choices. I've even co-designed a theoretical alternative protocol. We made this just to help us have deeper conversations about the implications of protocol designs and missing components the ecosystem will need to develop. Through all this I've only become more convinced that the open social web is going to be the future of the social web, and will even become a large portion of future web publishing.

Open Social Web

When I look at this future of the Open Social Web I like to think about all of these open social ecosystems, applications and protocols. It’s easy to start talking about a specific subset with terms like the Fediverse or Atmostphere. So I tend to refer to this larger ecosystem as the “Open Social Web”. I strive to remain open about protocol choice as I think there are benefits to each and we're still at the stage where there is a lot to learn from trying different implementations. While my personal use cases are more suited to the ATProto architecture, I can acknowledge that I'm just not the target audience for many of the more community focused features of ActivityPub. So while I'm going to be hosting on ATProto first, I'll try to ensure I cross post and not focus my discussions on a single architecture.

Open social benefits

There are many benefits of the open social web; ownership, control, linking, cross platform identities ….. This isn’t the post go into every aspect. I expect if you’ve ended up on my blog you already know the high level benefits, and I’ll save diving deeper into most for other posts. But I can show how I think about this ecosystem, as I guess I haven't been sharing that publicly yet. The easiest way for me to do that is to highlight the one benefit of the open social web that I find most important: the separation of content publishing and consumption drives innovation.

Three sides of content

I believe the web thrives by being open. It leads to great free and open content, amazing innovation and experimentation. All of this is just good for society. In these ecosystems I like to think of 3 main parties; the content creators, the content consumers and the platforms that facilitate this (consumption surfaces, discoverability, etc). The content creators are the most important, for without them there is no content. I see the content consumers as the next most vital, as they drive the content creators as well as the need for innovation. The platforms are important and they help raise the potential in the ecosystem, but I’ll be honest that I see them as 3rd in this list.

Competition

For a good flourishing open ecosystem you want there to be competition at each level. As long as people have time, they will create, and the continued advancement in creative tools only helps to accelerate this, so creator competition isn't a concern today. Everyone is a content consumer in some way or another so I don't worry about consolidation on this side. Some platforms however have (especially in the social space) become centralising hubs that have stifled competition. The main way of accomplishing this is by locking in content creators and consumers. Even when understanding the ecosystem and business reasons that led to this, we can clearly see it's now extremely hard for content creators or consumers to shift platforms (without abandoning a lot). New innovative platforms are at a major disadvantage due to that lock in, reducing competition. The lack of competition in that layer, has led to an imbalance of power between the other parties (creators and consumers) and slowed innovation.

Driving innovation

When open social web splits the content publishing and consumption, it breaks this barrier to entry and barrier to shifting. It does this in a great cycle. Firstly the content creators make their content open (in theory by choice for more users and less management overhead - in practice at the moment because these protocols are open by default). This then allows all platforms access to the same content, allowing for new ideas and new apps. Consumers now have more choice and will find the platforms that suit them best (algorithms, curation, features, personalisation, privacy, ads). Consumers spreading out across platforms just continues to drive more content creators to open publishing. The power shifts and platforms now need to compete by doing what's good for creators and users rather than focus on their own interests (e.g, preventing linking out, which only benefits platforms, not creators or consumers). When they compete, they innovate.