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.pub 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.pub and hashbase is whether they should develop a business model that recognises an optimum size. 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.

[vrypan]: https://blog.vrypan.net/2018/08/15/social-networks-dont-scale-socially/

[indieweb]: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started

[webmentions]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

[[microblog]: https://micro.blog/

[beakerbrowser]: https://beakerbrowser.com/

[hashbase]: https://hashbase.io

[DAT protocol]: https://datproject.org/