Founder, Musing Studio / Write.as.
I chased many things this year, particularly in business, and didn't achieve what I was hoping for. This hit me in the last week or so. Since I've been striving and grasping all year, reaching November far short of my goals felt disappointing — which is unusual for me. I'm usually fluid and adaptable, but at some point this year I stopped moving, my old goals ossified into hopes, and I lost my beat. Now I'm trying to reset a bit.
For a while, I've been looking to dip our toes into payments / monetization for writers on Write.as and WriteFreely. I've taken a “wait and see” approach to this so far, but now we're starting to experiment with some ideas.
Starting early last year, we saw a new creative use for WriteFreely: internal blogging. At the time, we worked with a large client to modify our open source platform and let admins run their site completely privately. We included this new option in the core platform, and started using it ourselves (as we do with all of our software). Then we launched a new hosted service, called Write.as for Teams, that I imagined would be the next big thing for us.
After some time, it's clear that this is still the next big thing for us. But the execution will be a bit different from what we initially planned — and it's in progress now.
This morning I spent some time thinking about Read Write.as and its general purpose. I want to keep its “publication”-like feel, so we pushed out some simple design changes that make it look more like that. But I also want to support the amazing social activity that's grown on it through quoted replies, good old-fashioned links, and shared hashtags. It's time to start thinking about facilitating conversation, instead of it happening accidentally.
Since joining the fediverse as a user in 2017, then starting to produce ActivityPub software in 2018, I've made the decentralized social web my home. It just feels right — as “right” as a digital space can be — and so I want to help it grow.
Here are some things I'd like to see, and some of the projects we're building at Write.as to help the ecosystem along.
A small conclusion arrived in my head the other morning, as I woke. It was years in the making. It said that technology, and digital text-based forms of communication in particular, will never replace or surpass real-life human interaction.
Out of any year in recent history, I can't think of one that I've looked forward to quite as much as 2020. Something about it feels different than the others.
I rang in the new year with no bells at all; just a quiet acknowledgement of the turning hand on the clock — a new hour, a new year, a new decade — and then turned my attention back to the movie I was watching on my parents' couch with a friend. There was no carousing, no fireworks, no champagne — just a tiny feeling in the back of my mind that some moment had finally arrived. I'm relaxed, I'm ready.
It's promising that Apple is focusing so much of their marketing efforts on the “privacy” of their products. Though it doesn't make someone like me want to buy an iPhone, it at least shows that people are growing concerned enough with the issue for a large company like Apple to address it. Still, we shouldn't rest all our hopes for digital privacy on a marketing campaign.
Since spring, I've been back and forth between my home of the last few years, northern Florida, and my home as a kid, northern Virginia. After a few more years in the South than I'd initially planned to stay, I finally started working on returning north to the comforting cold, falling leaves, and, well, seasons.
There's much to say about what I'm leaving behind (or not) in Florida, but today I'm thinking about the Publix grocery store I shopped at for basically my entire time there.
As I social-media'd on my social media this morning:
I don't think the ultimate replacement for social media will be called “social media” at all.
A project that frames itself this way declares itself a failure from the start. (That is, unless it launches with a billion users.) Look at countless past examples of attempts to go for the social media throne, like Google+. As a project, you call yourself a competitor, and the world hears about you as a competitor, but they also hear that you'll never make it — you're actually a “ghost town.”
As soon as it's uttered, you'll never become more than that. This title becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy no matter how large you grow, because people assume you aren't large (or manipulative) enough to retain users like Facebook, and everyone on your service is ready to jump ship at any moment. Even the people that take another look at you down the line remember that initial judgement: ghost town.
Calling yourself a “Facebook replacement” isn't going to manifest such a destiny. It's really an unfinished thought — the right idea, yes, but still unfinished. It doesn't actually answer the question of how you replace the incumbents.
It's not enough to simply wish it all away, and it's not enough to throw a ton of money at the problem. It's not enough to put better people behind the tech, and it's not enough to put cool new tech behind the same interface. It's not enough to write think pieces (try as I might) and it's not enough to have a better business model.
We all know Facebook is terrible. This is common knowledge in 2019. But if we're ever going to replace it, we can't frame new solutions in terms of social media. Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and on and on are social media. They won that title. Any new entrant to the space that calls themselves that loses by default. So let's not use that title.
Let's forget “social media.” The next thing won't be called that — and can't, at least if we care about it succeeding.
So what will we call it? Maybe that answer will fill in the rest, after all.
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