is the future of social media the same as its past?
Why breaking the grip of giant social media platforms may require a major step back into the web's early days.
After the recent hostile takeover of TikTok and given the close relationship between American social media platform owners and Donald Trump, the world is looking for more homegrown alternatives to today’s global titans, virtually all of them based in Silicon Valley and owned primarily by U.S. interests. With the American government turning on its allies, ignoring good business practices, and trying to censor the web according to the wet dreams of reactionary zealots, this quest for more tech choices is becoming ever more urgent.
Hey, I get it. It’s not fun to consider that the biggest social portfolio is ran by a weird frat bro in his 40s who thinks you don’t need friends, just AI. It’s unsettling to have a third of all internet users watching videos managed by an ad and search monopoly that spies on you 24/7 and has ties to multiple military agencies. And it’s downright nauseating to have the once premiere social network for journalists become a MAGA klaxon that generates CSAM, ran by the whims of a Trump backer considered far too creepy to invite to Evil Rich Dude Pedo Island, no matter how much he asked.
But it’s actually far more difficult than just having more platforms to choose from. If anything, creating another platform is the easy part. Scaling it and giving users the incentive to stay and keep posting is orders of magnitude harder. On top of that, we would effectively just be moving data from one jurisdiction to another, and as we all saw, allies today may be adversaries tomorrow, and now they have your information and possible blackmail material, or cues for an effective influence campaign.
Even worse, your typical user is platformed out. They already more or less ended up on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, X/itter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, an IM system like Slack for work purposes, and a few other specialty platforms for their hobbies and interests. They’ve posted an awful lot of content or trained an algorithm on all of them, and they’re loath to add yet another app to maintain.
And now you want them to not just add but outright move to yet another platform? Which may or may not have the people they actually want to follow? And requires a whole project in reposting and promoting their content for no reason other than you don’t like who owns their current ones? It’s too much.
Plus, they know Musk is evil, as are Meta’s Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Ellison and Yass, and that the board overseeing YouTube do not care about what ends up on their platform as long as it’s not hardcore porn and they can inject ads into it. And ad intros. Oh, and some ad outros, just for good measure. Point is, the social web’s users have seen the Good Place, they understand how capitalism works.
taking all your data and content to go
Perhaps the only way you could persuade them is if they could just move all of their data seamlessly, coming and going as they pleased so they didn’t have to invest the time and effort in a platform they’ll just be waiting to turn on them with censorship or propaganda, both government-backed and foreign trolls exploiting divisions for fun and profit, ideally in a way platforms couldn’t access without their say-so.
Internet and tech luminaries like the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee, and Jaron Lanier have popularized the idea of Data Pods, effectively collections of all your data owned by you. Your posts, images, videos, social graphs, what have you, which will simply come and go with you, with all social media platforms implementing protocols compatible with it — like the Fediverse’s ActivityPub.
As a spherical chicken in a vacuum idea, it sounds great. Your content is yours until the end of time and you choose its fate, or even license it to those who want to use it, allowing for syndication and making tech companies think twice before claiming dibs on anything you post. But what sounds great in techie circles doesn’t work that well when users have to be pretty savvy and dedicated to the cause to sign on.
Think of it like Linux. It’s not a simple alternative to Windows, or Mac OS, or Chrome, but an entire constellation of operating system flavors ranging from newbie-friendly, to highly specialized versions for servers, robotics, and spacecraft, and from buggy wrecks where you need a PhD in comp sci and 20 years of experience in C to print a document, to fairly smooth, user-friendly ecosystems. Data pods would be much like that in practice.
Back in the day, websites and blogs used to be hosted on personal computers which ran web servers as a background process, or on small hosts with a data center in one region. You owned your data and the infrastructure of the web was your distribution. This worked just fine for websites that were 99% text and small images, getting a few hundred or thousand views a day at most.
Add in video, live streams, millions of users online for hours every day, and virality on social networks, and suddenly, you need an infrastructure and coding upgrade that requires serious knowhow, or your little server was going to melt down because all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of strangers were curious about what you posted. It used to be affectionally called the “hug of death,” and it was painful and expensive.
will the web go ‘round and ‘round in circles?
Which brings us back to the data pods. In order to actually own those pods, you have to actually control where they live. So, you’ll either need a server or some sort of cold storage you can replicate into the cloud when you sign up for a new app. Except you don’t want the platform to have a copy of this data, otherwise you’ll just be doing the same thing we’re doing now with extra steps.
A proposed solution from Lanier is for platforms to pay for your data because that’s what attracts people to use them, so you’d rent your data to them for a small fee. But that would be a major deal-breaker for social platforms because they’re designed to monetize something you submit freely, and paying you even $150 per year will wipe a third of Meta’s profit off the balance sheet. Cue infuriated investors demanding more and more AI slop to fill the platform with content, any content as ad buffers.
At that point, why bother with huge, centralized platforms? They wouldn’t be able to grow at the pace that justified their valuations, they’d have to both pay users only to then try to charge them for something to recoup those costs, and at that point, cloud providers may as well design a data pod hosting product for the average user so they could just… host their own sites? Like it’s 2005 again?
Basically, if we say that user data has value — which it does, because that’s why the whole social media thing took off — and that users should a) own that data, b) have the right to say how it gets used, and c) get paid for creating and distributing it, you end up with social media platforms, data brokers, and ad agencies having whatever the corporate equivalent of a heart attack is as up to $5 trillion in market value is now up for debate among investors seriously questioning legality and long term viability.
Yet, all that said, no matter how complicated the idea of data pods would be in the real world, without it, countering exploitative or malicious platforms with yet another platform that will be totally different this time because… the vibes are nicer, I guess, isn’t going to fix the root of the problem: a public square exploiting users’ data and content for profit also easily exploited or bought out by bad actors.
Then again, the problem these fledging alternatives to American-based global giants may be trying to solve is "what if we could be the ones doing all the propaganda and censorship" instead of actually trying to protect anyone because, let’s be honest now, a lot of governments do and encourage some shady stuff and we probably shouldn’t trust them when they claim they’re doing something for our own good without proof that they’re actually solving a real problem in a meaningful way…