Moats & Drawbridges

Moats

One of the most common conversations about the open social web is about "moats," or the apparent lack thereof.

How do you keep people around when they can easily jump to another experience? How do you make sure another organization can't take your users with a similar product when all the data is available to tap into?

Ugh. Thanks, I hate it.

I've been processing why these questions bother me. Every time I hear it, all I can think is how it feels social silo coded.

Keeping users? Taking users? This is the mindset of corporations aiming for billions of users. The ones who want to trap users in via closed systems.

"You can't have them. They're ours." Then cue the "we have TikTok at home" on every platform that can squeeze it into their already-cluttered UX.

No thanks, I really hate it.

Drawbridges

In an open, people-first ecosystem, you don't win by "keeping" or "taking", or trying to collect and host as many users as possible. Instead, you do it by working for people who care about what you're building, give them tools and experiences they connect with, and build a sense of community around the service you're providing.

Or, as @rude1.blacksky.team elegantly said:

But the concept of moats still feels like "trapping" people in, even if that isn't the intent.

I think what's just as important as building community-based moats are drawbridges. Paths in and out that the community can keep down for people to enter, or lift when someone entering causes them harm.

The competitive advantage of the open social web and the services you build within it aren't limited to moats. They're the drawbridges that let people choose which moats are worth crossing over.

You don't "lose" users, they walk out over the drawbridge and go somewhere else until you show them why it's worth crossing back in. The other organization didn't "take" and "keep" your community member, they're just serving their needs better and those people that moved on expect more from you. Meet their expectations, or serve the people who still enjoy what you're building.

Drawbridges enable people to not be in abusive relationships with their technology, and it's what makes us better than the Meta's and X's of the world.

As a matter of fact, we're already seeing drawbridges succeed in this exact way. Let's talk about some of them.

A Federation of Blogs

In my last post, I talked about how and why I've decided to move this blog to @leaflet.pub. While doing that, I specifically call out that this isn't a one-way door and that I can easily change my mind again whenever I want.

I crossed a drawbridge from my self-hosted @standard.site blog over to one that has a service that makes me want to write more.

When I was "shopping" for my next blogging home, I honestly wasn't all that stressed about it. I didn't feel like I was making a final decision; I felt like I was choosing the features and experience that landed for me in that moment.

I'm still peering across the drawbridge at @pckt.blog, which just announced that they're launching microblogging on the platform. It's a separate microblog standard from Bluesky so that subscribers of publications in pckt can get smaller notes from them in between the longform ones. This will trend pckt toward being a more fully-featured Substack competitor, which would be appealing to users shopping to leave the toxic platform for something better.

I could even see a world where Leaflet and @offprint.app decide that they want to provide their publishers with the same feature and make use of that standard, or even fold it right back into the standard.site lexicon.

But if they don't, and I start seeing that pckt's microblogging feature has the potential to bring this blog's community closer together, I can just as easily cross the drawbridges over to pckt and continue where I left off with the features my blog needs.

Leaflet didn't take me. pckt and Offprint didn't lose me. I'm just here for now until another service does a better job for my needs.

Community as a Moat

I want to come back to the important observation Rudy made with what he and his team have built with Blacksky, and Acorn as an extension.

Rudy started Blacksky as just a custom feed for Bluesky's Black community, and is backed with moderation handled by community members. As the community grew and needs expanded, the team also expanded their team and offerings.

Today, they stand as a parallel atproto microblogging platform next to Bluesky, but are governed by their community using the Blacksky Assembly and have their own in-house moderation tools based on their experience with community-run moderation.

And it's working. There are 38,257 accounts on the Blacksky network today because that drawbridge from Bluesky was worth crossing over from and staying inside Blacksky's moat. The focus on small community is what's keeping people in, not artificial walls.

Now, they're extending all of that experience to folks who want to run communities on the open social web in the same way.

With Acorn, the team is helping other communities drop drawbridges out of Bluesky into smaller, community-owned and maintained spaces just like Blacksky. There's @medsky.network and @latinsky.social, each of which have their own respective community-managed feeds and web apps. Over time, the folks shepherding these Acorn communities can start building community-specific features, just as Blacksky has, making it more appealing to cross the drawbridge over from an app like Bluesky which tends to focus on a wider audience.

And what's makes joining these communities so easy is that, similar to my blogging choice, none of this is a final decision. Unless a person breaks trust, those drawbridges will remain down for them to arrive and leave as they please based on how they want to experience the communities they're a part of.

Community is the moat, and the drawbridges bring people into them because they want to be there.

Drawbridges of Bridges

The last example I want to give is about one that's close to my heart and completely breaks the metaphor: bridges. Specifically, I want to talk about @ap.brid.gy (Bridgy Fed) and @wafrn.net, the former of which is a drawbridge in and of itself, and the latter that really proves that community is a moat.

Bridgy Fed let's you connect across ecosystems like the Atmosphere and Fediverse using the account you already have. Bounce, it's sister service, lets you migrate your account across the protocols while keeping you connected to your network on the old protocol via Bridgy Fed. Bridgy Fed also lets you exit it, which means you can have a drawbridge that let's you leave the bridge. Yeah, I know, just roll with it.

Wafrn does this in a different way. It's a Fediverse platform that runs an atproto PDS next to it as the bridge. Anything you post on Wafrn, and by extension the Fediverse, gets bridged to the Atmosphere. The neat added trick is that you can also use that account to log into Atmosphere apps like Bluesky, although actions there won't bridge back to the Fediverse.

But Wafrn has a unique community that keeps people using the app rather than just using something like Bridgy Fed. It has it's own culture, it's own way of moderating itself, and a UX that's reminiscent of Tumblr.

So, if that appeals to you, you can even migrate between Bridgy Fed and Wafrn using Bridgy Fed's exit mechanism and Wafrn's migration tools. We literally have drawbridges between bridges now: one that let's you bridge from your community and one that has it's own community.

What a time to be alive, huh?

The Drawbridges are a Moat

A while back I wrote a piece about what I call The Last Network Effect. In it, I mention that if we bring a critical mass of users into the open social web and give them a variety of options they can migrate between, there would never be a reason for them to leave.

Why reset from scratch when you can just take your account elsewhere and pick up where you left off?

As I said earlier, when someone crosses a drawbridge, they aren't leaving - they're just visiting someplace else until you give them a reason to come back. So, while serving community needs may be the moat of each node within this ecosystem, the real moat is that we can build so many drawbridges that leaving this interconnected space feels pointless. And if you do the right things, maybe they'll happily cross back into your community.

In the end, I think those drawbridges are going to be the most important moat of all.