The Utopian Alternative To Twitter?

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, sound like a plan?

00:00:01.960 | - Yeah, sounds great.

00:00:03.060 | - All right, well, let's go on to our deep dive.

00:00:05.420 | I'm calling this one a world without Twitter.

00:00:09.660 | So I made what's perhaps the mistake

00:00:13.260 | of checking in this week on media coverage of Twitter,

00:00:18.260 | Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, what's going on there.

00:00:23.380 | I regret it.

00:00:25.040 | I kind of want those 30 minutes of my life back.

00:00:27.540 | Here's what I noticed in my cursory examination

00:00:32.540 | of media coverage of Elon Musk and Twitter

00:00:34.820 | is that essentially a decision has been made

00:00:38.260 | that Elon Musk is public enemy number one,

00:00:42.060 | and it has led to news coverage

00:00:43.660 | that I find to be both boring and ironic.

00:00:48.020 | So I think it's boring because what we have

00:00:50.160 | is just everyone lining up to take their shot

00:00:53.540 | at attacking Musk and why he's bad, right?

00:00:56.100 | So there's a pinata hanging, a proverbial pinata hanging,

00:01:00.300 | and there's a full consensus that this is a bad pinata

00:01:03.580 | that is going to destroy democracy.

00:01:06.140 | So I don't know where you buy your pinatas from,

00:01:07.940 | but don't buy it from that store.

00:01:09.060 | And everyone's just lining up to take their take.

00:01:11.180 | Now, why this is ironic is because it feels

00:01:14.740 | as if this consensus of he is bad guy number one

00:01:17.380 | needs to go away was formed on Twitter,

00:01:20.160 | is being enforced on Twitter,

00:01:23.260 | and after everyone takes their turn

00:01:25.040 | with their takedown piece on Musk,

00:01:27.100 | they then return to Twitter to see

00:01:29.980 | if they're getting enough lottets

00:01:31.660 | or how much celebration they're getting.

00:01:32.980 | So it's this weird sort of incestual circularity going on

00:01:37.420 | where all these reporters are obsessed with Twitter,

00:01:41.060 | that obsession with Twitter is fueling their takedown

00:01:44.080 | of Twitter on which they're seeing what the reaction is

00:01:46.820 | to their takedown of Twitter, all of it's all mixed up,

00:01:48.860 | and it's just uninteresting to me.

00:01:51.280 | So I thought, let me come at this topic

00:01:53.960 | from a different angle.

00:01:56.220 | So one of the discussions that's happening,

00:01:58.500 | which I think is more interesting,

00:01:59.700 | is will we see a viable alternative to Twitter emerge?

00:02:04.240 | And in particular, there's a strain of conversation

00:02:07.060 | that's big right now that's saying,

00:02:08.300 | will the potential fall of Twitter lead to the rise

00:02:13.300 | of one of the independent social media alternatives?

00:02:17.920 | So these independent social media alternatives

00:02:20.060 | that are not massive platform monopolies

00:02:22.780 | owned by billionaires.

00:02:24.320 | Now, I don't wanna act as if I'm ahead of all trends,

00:02:27.620 | but I do wanna point towards an article I wrote

00:02:29.800 | for "The New Yorker" back in 2019.

00:02:32.420 | I'm loading this on the tablet now

00:02:34.580 | for people who are watching

00:02:36.060 | at youtube.com/calendareportmedia.

00:02:38.880 | This was actually my first article I ever wrote

00:02:41.180 | for "The New Yorker."

00:02:42.780 | It is from May of 2019, and the title is,

00:02:46.700 | "Can Indie Social Media Save Us?"

00:02:51.740 | So the point of this article was to look at this subset

00:02:55.580 | of the social media universe which had been overlooked,

00:02:57.940 | which is independent social media services,

00:03:00.500 | small, often open-source social media alternatives.

00:03:04.540 | At the time, there wasn't much discussion of these.

00:03:07.000 | Today, there is.

00:03:08.040 | And in particular, in the last new cycle or two,

00:03:12.100 | there's been a lot of focus

00:03:13.020 | on one particular independent social media service

00:03:15.700 | called Mastodon.

00:03:17.100 | I'm gonna scroll here in this article

00:03:20.400 | to show you that Mastodon is something I mentioned about.

00:03:23.000 | So here we go.

00:03:23.960 | From my piece, "Mastodon,

00:03:26.060 | "another popular indie web service,

00:03:27.660 | "exists in the middle ground

00:03:28.760 | "between centralized and decentralized social media."

00:03:30.740 | So I talked about Mastodon back in 2019

00:03:34.060 | as a potential Twitter alternative.

00:03:36.540 | So this is what I wanna get into today.

00:03:39.440 | How does Mastodon work?

00:03:40.900 | Will it emerge as a potential,

00:03:44.520 | more independent alternative to what Twitter was doing?

00:03:48.140 | And if so, will that be better?

00:03:49.380 | And if not, what does that tell us?

00:03:50.500 | So how does Mastodon work?

00:03:51.700 | Will it become an alternative to Twitter?

00:03:56.380 | And then I'll return to what I wrote in this article,

00:03:58.340 | and we'll see how my conclusions from back then

00:04:00.340 | mesh with what I'm thinking today.

00:04:02.860 | All right, so what is Mastodon?

00:04:04.580 | Well, the right way to understand it is

00:04:06.740 | it is an open-source Twitter-style service,

00:04:11.580 | but unlike Twitter, it is distributed.

00:04:14.980 | So there is open-source software

00:04:16.580 | for running a Mastodon server.

00:04:18.760 | Anyone can go and download the software.

00:04:20.960 | They can install it on their own server,

00:04:22.620 | and they can run a Mastodon server.

00:04:25.180 | It's open-source, so it's free.

00:04:26.540 | You just have to give proper acknowledgement

00:04:29.420 | that, hey, this code comes from the Mastodon project.

00:04:31.580 | A little aside, there's a whole controversy

00:04:34.160 | that only really tech nerds understood,

00:04:35.940 | but when Donald Trump first launched

00:04:37.900 | his social media network, Truth Social,

00:04:40.520 | they essentially just stole all the code from Mastodon

00:04:43.860 | without doing any of the acknowledgments,

00:04:45.940 | and that created a bit of a problem.

00:04:47.740 | That sounds familiar.

00:04:48.580 | Anyways, so anyone can download the software,

00:04:50.700 | start their own server.

00:04:51.540 | So Jesse and I could put a computer here in the studio,

00:04:54.740 | and we could run a Mastodon server on it.

00:04:57.580 | When you're running a Mastodon server,

00:04:59.780 | you can have users join, sign up,

00:05:02.460 | have a username for your server,

00:05:03.840 | and what the server implements is something like Twitter.

00:05:07.080 | You can post things on the server, up to 500 characters,

00:05:11.260 | and you can see what other people have posted

00:05:14.120 | in reverse chronological order.

00:05:16.120 | So very much like a Twitter short form post,

00:05:20.040 | reverse chron, sorting type system.

00:05:23.480 | It has a similar follower dynamic to Twitter as well,

00:05:25.920 | so you can actually say,

00:05:26.760 | "Well, here are the people I wanna actually follow,

00:05:28.820 | "so show me their posts when they come up

00:05:30.740 | "in reverse chronological order.

00:05:32.200 | "I don't wanna know about that person," et cetera.

00:05:34.920 | All right, so that's the core of Mastodon.

00:05:36.520 | I can start my own mini Twitter for free.

00:05:39.840 | Anyone can join it.

00:05:41.400 | Typically, the way these servers are supported

00:05:43.440 | is Patreon, that's pretty common.

00:05:45.320 | I mean, it's not super expensive to run one of these servers

00:05:47.560 | but you might just ask the members,

00:05:48.960 | "Hey, can you kick in and donate?"

00:05:50.880 | So that's a nice benefit from those who are concerned

00:05:54.840 | about attention economy dynamics.

00:05:56.280 | It's typically not ad-based.

00:05:57.620 | It's, "Hey, this is gonna cost whatever,

00:05:59.840 | "couple thousand dollars a year to run.

00:06:01.320 | "Hey, users on my server, can you chip in some money?"

00:06:04.640 | Mastodon also comes with a protocol

00:06:08.040 | for different servers to talk to each other.

00:06:11.120 | So now what can happen is,

00:06:12.280 | let's say you have an account on the server

00:06:15.600 | that Jesse and I have here in the studio

00:06:17.920 | and there's whatever, 100 users who use this server

00:06:20.560 | and you follow some of them and you post

00:06:22.000 | and it looks like Twitter.

00:06:23.640 | You can follow people on other servers as well.

00:06:26.560 | So let's say someone else we know

00:06:28.760 | has their own Mastodon server

00:06:30.520 | and someone else who's interesting,

00:06:32.720 | who you find to be more interesting than Jesse and I,

00:06:35.720 | is over on that other server.

00:06:36.760 | So maybe you're like,

00:06:37.600 | "You know, I kinda like the Cal and Jesse server.

00:06:39.960 | "A lot of Harry Potter talk going on.

00:06:42.140 | "Not so sure that I only wanna hear what they have to say."

00:06:45.960 | But someone else we like is on another Mastodon server.

00:06:48.920 | You can say, "I wanna follow them."

00:06:50.680 | And this protocol, what it will do is basically

00:06:53.000 | your server will then talk to that other server and say,

00:06:55.300 | "Hey, we have someone over here

00:06:56.460 | "who cares about a user of yours.

00:06:58.860 | "Let us know when they post things."

00:07:00.440 | And so now I can see posts from other servers

00:07:04.640 | show up in my feed.

00:07:05.920 | All right, so it's a distributed solution.

00:07:08.120 | Individuals run these servers,

00:07:10.120 | but the servers can talk to each other.

00:07:11.900 | So I can see what people post on other servers

00:07:14.480 | if I choose to follow them and send a request.

00:07:17.720 | That's Mastodon.

00:07:18.820 | It has a real community niche feel.

00:07:23.820 | So traditionally, each individual Mastodon server,

00:07:26.760 | which are called instances in Mastodon speak,

00:07:29.960 | will develop their own,

00:07:30.980 | often quite complex community standards.

00:07:33.260 | That's the whole feel of Mastodons.

00:07:35.600 | Like over here, we have very specific rules

00:07:37.640 | about what you can and can't talk about.

00:07:38.920 | Over here, they might be different.

00:07:41.240 | This is similar a little bit to what we see

00:07:42.840 | with Reddit and subreddits.

00:07:44.280 | We get these very specific community standards

00:07:46.260 | that exist on different Reddits.

00:07:47.860 | As it's become clear in the recent news cycles,

00:07:50.800 | it also has very powerful banning type features.

00:07:54.140 | So you can easily, as an admin,

00:07:56.080 | kick people off your instance.

00:07:57.880 | You can also block people on your server

00:08:00.840 | from following anyone from another server.

00:08:02.880 | So I can, if I run the Jesse Cal server,

00:08:05.280 | and I don't like this rival Harry Potter server,

00:08:10.460 | I can ban that server,

00:08:11.800 | which means no one on my server

00:08:13.360 | is allowed to follow anyone from that server.

00:08:15.200 | You can also ban individuals.

00:08:16.720 | No one on my server can follow this particular individual.

00:08:19.180 | So there's a lot of power the admins have

00:08:21.900 | to control not just what's posted,

00:08:24.520 | but who the people on their server can actually follow

00:08:28.100 | or receive information from.

00:08:30.360 | All right, so that's basically how Mastodon works.

00:08:34.760 | So it is Twitter, but it has its own thing going on.

00:08:38.780 | Back to my 2019 article,

00:08:40.800 | I'll just show a couple things I wrote

00:08:42.400 | about Mastodon back then.

00:08:44.020 | So one thing I wrote in that article is,

00:08:48.280 | because most Mastodon instances are small,

00:08:51.600 | each typically, typically each number

00:08:53.200 | is a couple thousands of users,

00:08:54.720 | and crowdfunded by their members,

00:08:55.880 | they feel different from mass social media

00:08:59.060 | with an enticing freeform energy

00:09:01.320 | reminiscent of the internet's early days.

00:09:04.340 | The contrast between this atmosphere

00:09:06.040 | and the one found on existing social networks

00:09:08.000 | is striking.

00:09:09.680 | So you definitely get this feel.

00:09:11.960 | I hung out a lot on Mastodon

00:09:13.280 | when I was writing that 2019 article.

00:09:16.920 | It feels like early web stuff.

00:09:19.040 | Very specific niche communities, very specific rules,

00:09:23.280 | reminiscent of the textual conventions

00:09:26.400 | of Usenet news groups,

00:09:28.560 | or the weird acronyms that were developed,

00:09:30.360 | the standards that were developed

00:09:31.400 | on early bulletin boards like The Well.

00:09:34.380 | Here's a more concrete summary I gave

00:09:37.880 | from that experience.

00:09:39.400 | Mastodon, at least for now,

00:09:40.760 | is a human scale environment

00:09:43.200 | in which users are happy to chat

00:09:44.720 | about quirky things with other quirky people.

00:09:48.240 | Recently, when I logged into the Mastodon instance,

00:09:50.520 | sunbeam.city, a quote,

00:09:53.160 | "Libertarian socialist solar punk instance,"

00:09:56.560 | I found a photo of someone's blooming spider plant

00:09:58.840 | next to a conversation about the consequences

00:10:00.760 | of ethical transparency and hierarchical systems.

00:10:02.960 | It struck me as the quintessential

00:10:04.480 | early internet experience.

00:10:06.960 | Right?

00:10:07.800 | So that's what Mastodon looked like to me in 2019.

00:10:09.680 | It's like old Usenet boards.

00:10:10.920 | It's cool.

00:10:11.960 | Everyone's doing their own thing.

00:10:13.760 | The following between servers didn't seem widespread.

00:10:17.160 | It was more, "I like sunbeam.city.

00:10:19.800 | I like these people.

00:10:20.680 | We have our own quirky thing going on.

00:10:22.660 | Let's just go hang out there."

00:10:24.600 | So a really good early web energy.

00:10:28.140 | Can this be a replacement for Twitter

00:10:30.680 | that doesn't have one person?

00:10:32.880 | Priorly, that might've been Jack Dorsey.

00:10:35.620 | Today, it's Elon Musk.

00:10:36.600 | Can we have a version of Twitter then

00:10:38.640 | where there is no one person,

00:10:39.880 | some sort of a utopian alternative to Twitter?

00:10:43.080 | Can these good vibes I picked up in 2019 scale

00:10:46.840 | to be a Twitter-size impact on the internet?

00:10:50.880 | And here my argument is no.

00:10:52.480 | Mastodon will never be Twitter.

00:10:57.040 | It will never have its same significance

00:10:58.740 | or its same audience.

00:11:00.440 | The reason for this,

00:11:02.380 | and as I've talked about before on this show,

00:11:05.360 | Twitter is incredibly successful

00:11:08.440 | because it is a finely tuned engagement machine.

00:11:12.280 | That is very difficult to do.

00:11:14.280 | So we've gone into this before,

00:11:15.560 | but at the core of Twitter's success is three elements.

00:11:19.520 | One, that it has a massive user base

00:11:21.820 | that includes many potentially interesting people

00:11:24.220 | with engaging things to say.

00:11:25.400 | So you need a huge foundation

00:11:28.320 | of potentially interesting people

00:11:29.800 | with potentially interesting things to say.

00:11:31.480 | And I'm using interesting here

00:11:32.560 | in a completely value-neutral manner.

00:11:34.680 | It could be, interesting means engaging.

00:11:37.840 | So it could be outrageous.

00:11:39.420 | It could be shocking, or it could be funny,

00:11:41.820 | or it could be very smart.

00:11:43.220 | So you have comedians, you have expert commentators,

00:11:45.760 | you have celebrity figures,

00:11:47.820 | you have figures who have interesting takes

00:11:50.440 | on different aspects of the culture.

00:11:52.720 | It's huge user base.

00:11:53.960 | Number two, Twitter has this massive social graph

00:11:56.780 | where all of these people have painstakingly defined

00:12:00.320 | these one-on-one dyadic follower connections.

00:12:03.620 | This creates this densely connected social graph

00:12:07.000 | that is encoding these type

00:12:08.720 | of social cultural capital relations.

00:12:11.440 | I'm following you because of,

00:12:13.440 | I just, all these subtle things I know about you

00:12:15.400 | and your standing in society

00:12:16.640 | or the content that you produce.

00:12:18.780 | You combine that with the retweet button

00:12:21.120 | and they come together to give you this sort of emergent,

00:12:24.160 | distributed curation algorithm

00:12:25.800 | that's fantastically effective.

00:12:28.040 | So you have all these interesting people

00:12:29.300 | throwing out potentially effective things.

00:12:31.240 | Then you have the cumulative impact of 237 million users

00:12:34.720 | clicking retweet in this complex social graph.

00:12:37.000 | And what emerges is this really successful

00:12:39.800 | filtering function where stuff that's engaging

00:12:42.300 | is identified and spread.

00:12:43.940 | As a result, if you click that Twitter app on your phone,

00:12:49.760 | its ability to show you thing after thing after thing

00:12:53.760 | that's going to capture your attention,

00:12:55.540 | that you could lose hours into, is almost unparalleled.

00:12:59.600 | Instagram can do this pretty well

00:13:01.320 | with a similar sort of setting.

00:13:02.720 | Facebook is used to do this pretty well,

00:13:04.760 | but is now struggling.

00:13:06.640 | TikTok is doing this very well,

00:13:08.080 | as we've talked about before.

00:13:09.440 | They've replaced this human centric distributed curation

00:13:12.240 | with pure algorithmic curation,

00:13:15.140 | but it works pretty well in the sense of

00:13:16.400 | you can get lost in TikTok

00:13:19.840 | even more effectively than Twitter.

00:13:21.360 | But very few people can do this.

00:13:23.600 | It is a tight wire act.

00:13:25.040 | It is very difficult to pull off.

00:13:26.560 | This, I can get lost in hours streaming

00:13:28.600 | almost everything I see scrolling on this app

00:13:31.080 | is gonna catch my attention in some way.

00:13:33.720 | Mastodon can't replicate that.

00:13:35.980 | It doesn't have enough critical mass of interesting people.

00:13:38.960 | It doesn't have this existing deep complex follower,

00:13:43.800 | social graph, which does a really good job

00:13:45.920 | of amplifying things.

00:13:47.480 | In fact, the dynamics of the Mastodon,

00:13:49.600 | there's a few choices that they've made specifically.

00:13:52.080 | And by they, there's an actual founder, Eugene Rochko.

00:13:56.600 | They've made these decisions

00:13:57.720 | to try to cut down on virality.

00:13:59.240 | You can't quote tweet people,

00:14:02.400 | whatever they would call it on Mastodon,

00:14:03.480 | quote post people.

00:14:04.320 | It's difficult to spread other people's things.

00:14:06.960 | Eugene wanted it to be more people

00:14:08.480 | just talking back and forth.

00:14:10.040 | It's difficult to do threads.

00:14:12.300 | You have all this dynamic of very niche content moderation

00:14:15.520 | and banning back and forth between different people.

00:14:17.740 | So you don't have that virality.

00:14:19.520 | You don't have the core of interesting people.

00:14:21.360 | So what you don't get on Mastodon is that experience.

00:14:23.880 | So if I open that app and I am engaged

00:14:25.880 | for as long as I wanna scroll,

00:14:27.480 | what I saw when I was on Mastodon,

00:14:30.000 | which I think is true of the experience today,

00:14:31.600 | is you enter a conversation with a community.

00:14:34.160 | Most of the stuff you see is not that interesting.

00:14:36.500 | It's more about going back and forth with people

00:14:39.240 | that over time you get to know.

00:14:41.620 | And you find interesting things.

00:14:42.920 | You have to do a lot of work.

00:14:44.200 | You have to do a lot of sifting.

00:14:46.280 | That's early web stuff.

00:14:47.840 | And it's cool.

00:14:48.740 | But from a pure engagement perspective,

00:14:52.240 | can't hold a candle to Twitter.

00:14:54.120 | No one is gonna fall down a Mastodon rabbit hole

00:14:56.560 | hours at an end.

00:14:57.720 | As reporter after reporter is realizing

00:15:00.200 | as they write about this service,

00:15:01.360 | it's actually kinda hard to spend a lot of time on Mastodon.

00:15:04.300 | It's like a Usenet news group in the early days.

00:15:06.680 | It's like the well.

00:15:07.720 | There's some cool stuff.

00:15:08.760 | You meet some cool people.

00:15:10.680 | Most of it's not that engaging.

00:15:12.720 | So no, I don't think Mastodon's gonna be

00:15:15.160 | a replacement for Twitter.

00:15:19.120 | Is that a problem?

00:15:20.280 | I would say no.

00:15:22.720 | I don't think we need a replacement for Twitter.

00:15:25.940 | There is a great danger in taking essentially

00:15:30.880 | the entire populace of internet users

00:15:33.320 | and putting them all together on a homogenized interface.

00:15:37.020 | Everyone has easy access, the exact same accounts,

00:15:40.260 | all information looks the same,

00:15:42.280 | the network of connections through which information

00:15:44.640 | is being amplified, the curation is happening

00:15:46.780 | on the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

00:15:49.540 | I think that is a dangerous recipe.

00:15:52.500 | I think that is a dangerous recipe.

00:15:54.700 | It does not play well with the human social brain.

00:15:57.500 | It create, the virality dynamics create these,

00:16:00.420 | as we've seen, intense tribal pressures,

00:16:04.280 | intense psychological distress.

00:16:06.440 | Yes, it's very engaging to look at Twitter,

00:16:08.540 | but Twitter over the last three or four years

00:16:10.060 | has become engaging in the same way

00:16:11.580 | that the Roman Colosseum was engaging.

00:16:13.840 | It's more about watching gladiators from your tribe

00:16:17.060 | do battles from gladiators from the other tribe,

00:16:19.340 | reveling in the outrage when someone from your tribe

00:16:22.060 | is being unfairly speared with the proverbial trident

00:16:26.020 | and the people commenting on how unfair this is,

00:16:27.920 | celebrating when your team gets someone from the other team.

00:16:30.700 | We found an angle of attack.

00:16:32.340 | We threw that net thing around them

00:16:33.900 | and dragged them into the lion pit.

00:16:35.320 | It's spectacle, it's a spectacle of the elites,

00:16:37.960 | as I said in a recent New Yorker piece.

00:16:40.580 | Yeah, it's engaging,

00:16:41.700 | but we don't need that type of engagement.

00:16:43.580 | And I know there's lots of other arguments

00:16:45.160 | in favor of Twitter.

00:16:46.000 | Journalists like it because it helps them find

00:16:48.040 | what's going on in the news.

00:16:49.380 | I don't mind if you have to work harder

00:16:50.820 | to find out what's going in the news

00:16:52.020 | because the side effect of you all using the same platform

00:16:55.180 | is that everything becomes consensus.

00:16:57.640 | Everyone just says,

00:16:58.480 | what is our particular tribe in the world of media

00:17:01.400 | think about this?

00:17:02.480 | Great, let's go.

00:17:04.160 | There's not enough interesting new angles.

00:17:06.280 | There's not enough, I would say,

00:17:07.560 | diverse viewpoints of world events.

00:17:09.440 | It all just breaks, balkanizes into three viewpoints

00:17:11.900 | and everyone goes back to the arena.

00:17:13.100 | So I don't care if it's harder for you to find news.

00:17:16.620 | Yeah, it can help you connect with interesting people.

00:17:19.080 | There's other ways to connect with interesting people

00:17:21.000 | that aren't gonna put your blood pressure through the roof.

00:17:24.420 | That's not gonna give you a low grade anxiety disorder

00:17:26.840 | like Twitter can do.

00:17:28.400 | Mastodon is great for that.

00:17:29.660 | Join an instance, have several instances.

00:17:32.500 | If affinity groups are related to things you care about,

00:17:36.880 | you can build really interesting relationships there.

00:17:39.060 | It's a small scale, it's a human style scale,

00:17:41.020 | but it's connecting you to people

00:17:42.000 | that you never otherwise would have found

00:17:43.240 | without the internet.

00:17:44.200 | That's brilliant social internet possibility at work

00:17:47.220 | without those downsides of Twitter.

00:17:49.900 | And the engagement part of Twitter,

00:17:51.200 | find other things that are engaging.

00:17:53.000 | Read books, watch streaming shows,

00:17:56.160 | listen to episode after episode

00:17:57.920 | of the Deep Questions podcast.

00:18:00.280 | Do stuff in the real world.

00:18:02.000 | Make more Harry Potter references.

00:18:04.200 | I don't know.

00:18:05.020 | The fact that this is engaging

00:18:07.240 | is not enough of a justification

00:18:08.780 | for we should keep it around.

00:18:09.620 | So I don't think Mastodon could replace Twitter,

00:18:11.560 | but I don't think we need anything to replace Twitter.

00:18:15.400 | So let me go back to the conclusion

00:18:16.680 | I made in that 2019 article.

00:18:18.440 | Let's see if I was clairvoyant or not.

00:18:20.340 | So I did say the internet may work better

00:18:25.120 | when it's spread out as originally designed.

00:18:26.740 | So I like this idea of more distributed,

00:18:29.000 | more niche, less universal.

00:18:31.700 | But then I conclude, despite its advantages, however,

00:18:35.280 | I suspect that the Indie web will not succeed

00:18:38.400 | in replacing existing social media platforms

00:18:40.520 | at their current scale.

00:18:41.740 | For one thing, the Indie web lacks

00:18:44.720 | the carefully engineered addictiveness

00:18:46.720 | that helped fuel the rise of services

00:18:48.080 | like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

00:18:49.980 | This addictiveness has kept people returning

00:18:52.680 | to their devices even when they know

00:18:54.120 | there are better uses for their time.

00:18:55.880 | Remove the addiction and you might lose the users.

00:18:59.200 | All right, I think that's just another way

00:19:00.560 | of saying what I'm saying today.

00:19:02.260 | Those existing giants were fantastically effective

00:19:04.940 | at generating engagement.

00:19:06.280 | Indie social media can't compete.

00:19:08.300 | Get rid of the engagement,

00:19:09.580 | you lose most of the users.

00:19:10.980 | As I go on to say, though,

00:19:13.480 | that's not necessarily a bad thing.

00:19:17.480 | It may be too that people who are uneasy

00:19:19.740 | about social media aren't looking

00:19:21.440 | for a better version of it,

00:19:23.380 | but are instead ready to permanently reduce

00:19:25.540 | the role that their smartphones play in their lives.

00:19:29.620 | That I think is the most hopeful

00:19:34.440 | potential conclusion here is,

00:19:37.320 | sure, there's alternatives that can,

00:19:39.120 | some people who are into social internet stuff

00:19:41.560 | can find actually healthier, more community-driven,

00:19:44.400 | more eccentric, original, early web-style

00:19:47.320 | online communities, and I'm glad those exist.

00:19:49.640 | Most people will say if Twitter fell,

00:19:52.080 | I'm not gonna sign up for a Mastodon instance,

00:19:54.160 | and honestly, it's kinda nice to be able

00:19:56.080 | to hear the birds again and see the sunshine.

00:19:58.560 | I'm sorta glad this thing is gone.

00:20:00.640 | I don't need a replacement.

00:20:02.640 | So that's where I fall.

00:20:03.900 | No, we're not gonna see an obvious replacement

00:20:06.080 | for Twitter, and I don't care that that might end up

00:20:09.360 | being the reality that we go into next.

00:20:12.620 | I mean, the real question, Jesse,

00:20:14.600 | is Twitter gonna go away?

00:20:16.600 | I'm not convinced.

00:20:17.520 | It's hard for me to tell.

00:20:18.760 | - I don't think it's gonna go away.

00:20:21.280 | - There's issues about engineering.

00:20:22.720 | This is the conversation right now

00:20:24.520 | is because so many people are being fired

00:20:26.220 | that it'll literally crash.

00:20:27.900 | Putting those aside, it's an engagement engine

00:20:31.920 | like almost no one else.

00:20:33.440 | Like for people who are too old,

00:20:36.040 | or I'll get yelled at for this,

00:20:37.840 | or have too much self-respect to be on TikTok,

00:20:39.800 | it's the next most addictive thing to have, right?

00:20:41.840 | I mean, it's an incredibly engaging thing,

00:20:43.880 | especially if you're a well-educated, upper-middle class,

00:20:47.640 | sort of elite knowledge worker type.

00:20:49.720 | It's put it in my veins engagement.

00:20:52.240 | It's like, yeah, there's very few things

00:20:54.520 | that can compete with that.

00:20:56.580 | And it's really hard.

00:20:58.600 | That's my thing is that engagement requires

00:21:00.600 | all of these elements to come together.

00:21:02.120 | And a lot of them relied on first mover advantages.

00:21:05.680 | 237 million users that include all these interesting people,

00:21:08.680 | this incredibly valuable social graph,

00:21:10.440 | that the interface retweet dynamic

00:21:12.680 | that does such a good job of curation.

00:21:14.120 | It's hard to do that.

00:21:15.860 | So yeah, I'm kind of with you.

00:21:17.040 | I mean, unless Musk shuts it down,

00:21:19.640 | like the tech crashes and he says enough of it,

00:21:21.920 | let's just shut it down,

00:21:22.880 | which I don't think is gonna happen.

00:21:24.280 | - He wouldn't waste $40 billion to do that.

00:21:26.600 | - Yeah, his debt service on his Twitter acquisition

00:21:30.200 | is a billion dollars a year.

00:21:31.520 | He owes a billion dollars a year

00:21:32.960 | just to service the debt on Twitter.

00:21:35.080 | So I don't think he's gonna do that.

00:21:37.480 | I think what's gonna happen is,

00:21:39.320 | and it's something I talked about a while ago,

00:21:40.680 | is that Twitter was actually well positioned

00:21:43.880 | to be taken private like he did.

00:21:45.520 | It could easily be something that generates

00:21:48.540 | a couple of billion dollars a year in revenue,

00:21:50.760 | pretty sleekly with really high profit margins,

00:21:54.260 | which is really all Musk needs out of it.

00:21:56.320 | So once you lose that ambition that Facebook has

00:21:59.600 | to be a trillion dollar valuation company,

00:22:02.920 | which was their ambition before the wheels fell off.

00:22:05.160 | Once you're like,

00:22:06.000 | "We don't have to be a trillion dollar competitor to Apple."

00:22:09.180 | Once it's, "Hey, this thing generates 2.5 billion a year

00:22:13.040 | off of 150 million really engaged users

00:22:15.200 | and it has a sleek background

00:22:16.760 | and we have a 2000 employee company

00:22:18.840 | and we can service our debt

00:22:20.920 | and it makes good profit for the people who own it."

00:22:24.640 | I mean, I'm sure that's the play.

00:22:27.680 | The question is whether he's all there.

00:22:29.560 | That's the only eight ball here.

00:22:31.480 | I don't know.

00:22:32.320 | It's hard to tell because everything's so negative

00:22:33.600 | on Musk right now.

00:22:34.440 | I mean, if he's literally losing his grip mentally,

00:22:37.760 | then God knows what will happen.

00:22:39.720 | But if we assume a strategic Musk,

00:22:42.040 | I don't think it's that hard to make this a sleek,

00:22:46.240 | profitable, semi-niche service.

00:22:49.720 | It's not trying to be TikTok or Facebook.

00:22:51.680 | It's not trying to be Mastodon.

00:22:52.960 | It's somewhere in between

00:22:54.200 | and generates like a reasonable amount of money

00:22:56.600 | for a small number of people.

00:22:57.560 | That's probably where it'll end up.

00:22:59.160 | - You should ask your boy, Lex.

00:23:00.720 | - Yeah.

00:23:02.440 | Yeah, I should.

00:23:03.260 | I think Lex is buddies with Elon.

00:23:05.880 | - Yeah, he's on a show.

00:23:07.320 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:23:08.160 | I think they're buddies.

00:23:09.480 | I'll ask him.

00:23:10.600 | I'll say, "What's going on here?"

00:23:13.120 | All right.

00:23:13.960 | (upbeat music)

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The Utopian Alternative To Twitter?

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