Vrypan says:

‘social networks don’t scale socially’.

It’s true. We need a distributed alternative to the monolithic megacorporations.

The indieweb is a way of including in the web itself a set of social network protocols.  The big social network silos are then redundant, because social network functionality can exist everywhere by design.

An example Vrypan uses is the webmention.  I’m loving micro.blog and am also intrigued by the DAT protocol and beaker browser. Such ideas are the building blocks of the next web, I hope.

The next web will be fit for humans.

The issue for semi-commercial operations like micro.blog and hashbase is whether they should develop a business model that recognises an optimum size.

But what even is the optimum size for a social network? One metric might be: ‘can be maintained by one admin person’. That would be a small network – hence the value of distribution and federation.

Update: June 2025

So how have these musings aged in nearly 7 years?

  • Most of the DAT protocol stuff (especially Beaker browser and hashbase) was deprecated and one of its main authors, Paul Frazee, became a lead engineer on Bluesky. Does this social network recognise an optimum size? Probably not.
  • At the other extreme, micro.blog is still going strong as a one-person business. I use it all the time and find it to be a great ‘Swiss army knife’ of the Indie web.
  • Meanwhile, the main social media networks became even more toxic, which would have seemed impossible back in the halcyon days of 2018.
  • Have we got a distributed alternative yet? Well, the rise of Mastodon has offered an alternative, though not without technical questions. Many of the Mastodon instances are in effect operated by a single person.
  • And Vrypan is still blogging from Athens. He seems to have got into blockchain stuff, which is another distributed network, I guess.

I still hold that the web itself is the social network. We no more need Instabook et al. than we needed the Compuserve Information Manager or the Prodigy or AOL equivalent ‘portals’ after the Web opened up in 1994 (see: Banks, 2008).

A vintage computer screen displays the Prodigy Internet Forum interface, showcasing a menu with internet service options and a description of Prodigy’s internet features.

But is the next web fit for humans yet? I’d say definitely not, though corners are looking habitable.

References:

Michael Banks, On the Way to the Web. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2008. doi.org/10.1007/9…