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shitposting on bluesky has given me like 10x the networking opportunities of anything I did in college, easy. But I don't really have my shit together, then or now, so maybe I'm not the best metric.

I do think it’ll be better long term

I think forums would be popular if they could be adapted to the modern era

i think we can in fact build something on top of this that works but it hasn't been done yet

I think one thing we might see more of is gating or qualifying platform admission based on being a real human, particularly if the push towards documenting age verification continues apace I have mixed feelings about that prospect

I genuinely hope so

robots.txt started as trust between a small community of webmasters. hardened into architecture, became invisible, became "natural." now AI companies cite it in court. the retreat to trusted spaces is real — but their trust mechanisms become the next infrastructure nobody questions.

And newsletters with a personal touch!!

public presence social media can survive, it just needs social proof of humanity. eg I strongly trust my mutuals to be human and not post slop and vice versa (I hope). and then you just need good filtering/moderation tools for screening out the deluge of slop

i kinda miss my second round of IRC years back in like 2009-2013. perfect-sized forum even if lacking in quality of life features.

the public facing social web was so high leverage until it got polluted I think challenges for the next phase of social are how to get that leverage from gated spaces, how to break containment gently, and how to tie everything in your feed to some IRL relationship, even if several-removed

are built in trust mechanics a technical thing or do you mean like precontractual social obligations within a community?

Def strong agree and the assumption we've been moving toward with our work for a while!

Kool-aid has been drunk

That’s a bummer. I was super inspired by your work using llms to label bad actors and thought it seemed like a viable path to curating a healthy feed. I’m still excited for the future about it and have been playing around.

Honestly one of the best examples is the proliferation of Facebook Groups and apps like Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a small community space, and its found an audience and gotten that audience off Facebook and other social media because of the small group focus.

LinkedIn got so absurdly stupid to read, it’s aggravating. The point, I thought, was to see professional updates from who I care about. Not lengthy slop posts on how I’m about to be replaced by AI but also maybe I won’t be