Where will communities hang out in the upcoming decade?

It felt for a second that fb would consume the market with groups, but that has thankfully not happened.

I do miss searchable public forums specializing in topics.

I imagine that one thing are big anonymous entertainment focused internet spaces like the Reddit front page or this place somewhat, and another completely different are those smaller spaces where a particular subject or group of familiar people meet to talk about something specific. The latter is more exciting to me in the long term.

I've seen a lot of movement on Reddit in the past couple of years. More memes, less discussion type posts are making it to /r/all (though tbf all has mostly been memes the 8 years I've been around).

There are a few large-ish communities that I frequent that seem to draw a lot of "normies", one of them being /r/fasting. I constantly see comments that are made by obviously tech-illiterate people. A quick google search would answer their questions, but they are content to post a comment and maybe get a response in 6 hours when someone takes pity on their ignorance. To me, this means those users are either very young, or trending older without an obvious career revolving around technology.

There's nothing wrong with those demographics, but as I think we've all seen with the rise and fall of various social media platforms over the past decade, when you reach mass adoption, things change.

For the next few years, I see Instagram continuing to take off. It's a lot easier to ignore the hateful comments or miss them entirely, instead focusing on simply looking at pictures. If FB deems engagement to be too low if/when the masses move off FB proper, I'd be interested to see if they start to include more text alongside those images in users' feeds to drive that same engagement they fomented on Facebook.

Discord is still rapidly growing in gamer circles, with almost every group of friends making their own servers. Heck, my wife is part of one with a few of her friends and she is by no means a "gamer". They just use comms while playing Stardew Valley co-op.

Public Slack groups I fear are going the way of the dodo now that Salesforce has acquired them. They've already been declining in popularity since Slack closed the invite via API loophole.

I am seeing a lot of new movement on Discourse forums. A new bank I'm trying out has one to discuss features and build community support with users, as well as my Home Automation platform of choice. Panic just started one for their new Nova text editor for plugin development discussion. Etc. Really like Discourse and I appreciate that the feature set seems to be standardized across most installations. I'm curious what kind of plugin ecosystem exists for Discourse and if that will grow moving forward. So far, it doesn't seem like many sites are utilizing it.

Private IM chats populated mainly by IRL friends/acquaintances. I feel like internet only friendships are going extinct.

VR would be nice

In 1000 years we will have ascended :) but if not, I hope to be chilling on Risa somewhere!

In all seriousness, in the future I suspect we will use a combination of these types of capabilities but they will all be linked together in a way that prevents totalitarian control of speach.

I think some of the best technologies today are keybase.io matrix.org briarproject.org and community.mattermost.com

My view is that the next emerging social network will be based on a secure and self hostable compute fabric that leverages zero trust compute and secure compute, data sharing, etc. I think Urbit had the right direction but went crazy and lost the plot.

I'm working on this problem personally and I hope to be in alpha / beta testing for certain aspects of the platform by end of year :) Feel free to reach out if you want some additional details.

I think it pays a lot of dividends to understand some of the history of the past so that we can learn from them as we look to build something better for the future, so I’ve decided to publish some of my thoughts on this topic and also share some of my findings with the community so that nobody has to go down this massive rabbit hole again in the near term.

History of Social Networking: https://october.substack.com/p/part-i-the-next-great-online-... https://october.substack.com/p/part-ii-usenet-a-genuinely-pu... https://october.substack.com/p/part-iii-slashdot-and-advogat... https://october.substack.com/p/yik-yak-secret-and-the-minima... https://october.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-demise-of-branch

One of the best readings on this topic is here: almost a library about the history of the net and Netizens http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/

This is a pretty good overview of current state of alternatives: https://medium.com/hackernoon/so-you-want-to-leave-facebook-...

good write-up on layering complex systems and why this is a hard thing to solve for: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2

MIT/Zitrain: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4455262/Zittrain...

Activity-Pub/SOLID/SSB/Matrix/others: In my view, the links below offer us a real foundation for the future of the internet that can be used together to build a better social fabric

https://solidproject.org/about https://activitypub.rocks https://matrix.org https://briarproject.org https://scuttlebot.io https://joinmastodon.org https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-proofs-for-mastodon-and-ever... https://keybase.io

But even as we find our way with the technology, we are repeating the mistakes that we should have learned from in the past: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork... https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

"At the core of the open source ethos is the idea of liberty. Open source is about inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone." — GitHub employees' letter to GitHub

And Now, it’s about time to discuss the net bill of rights that our future social network should adhere to: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Book_Anniversary/Appendix.pd...

Here’s the thing, once you read all of this stuff you begin to get the idea that this problem is actually bigger than just a social networking platform—there are lots of these and yet as every Netizen can see, the problems still exist. The fabric of our problems isn’t so much that we don’t have the technology to solve the problems of our times—the issue is that it almost requires that we burn down the existing system in order to make the world a better place! BUT WAIT!!!

Before we think about burning it all down, I think there are a few things that we should consider first and, of course, there will be lots more links and examples along the way! One thing that I want to emphasize as we go on this journey, is that form must fit function—up until now, I think social networking and it’s controlled/heavy-handed evolutionary path has left a rather sour taste in the mouths of many. But, this conclusion is both a result of the evolution of social networking, but also the result of a change in the way that we use technology and our relationship to our devices/machines.

I'll be publishing a series of blog posts on this very soon. Hope this helps!

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