Maybe social media is going well after all? At least better than Facebook, X or TikTok? Mike McCue, boss and founder of the news aggregator Flipboard and Netscape veteran, says: yes.
For him, the open W3C standard ActivityPub, on which decentralized social networks like Mastodon are based, has revolutionary potential. In an interview with 1E9, he speaks of the “biggest change in the web since the web itself.” Because ActivityPub could do with the walled gardens of Meta, X & Co. exactly what HTML and HTTP and web browsers like Netscape Navigator once did with AOL:
“AOL was okay, but only offered very limited options. You could buy plane tickets, but you couldn’t compare hotels, find the most beautiful travel destinations or book holiday apartments through services like AirBnB. These options only came with the web, because AOL was walled Garden. There were only the innovations that AOL could afford and implement with its staff.”
It was only the open World Wide Web that broke open these walled gardens – based on HTML and HTTP, i.e. on simple standards and protocols.
Meta, of all things, could help the Fediverse achieve a breakthrough
The special thing about social networks based on ActivityPub: Not only are they decentralized, they can be operated by many individual “instance owners” without huge central servers. They are also interoperable. This means that following each other and communicating with each other works across network boundaries. The resulting conglomerate of ActivityPub services such as Mastodon, PixelFed, PeerTube and other services is currently called Fediverse. Mike McCue assumes that the term social web will become established at some point.
In his view, the mixture of decentralization and interoperability offers opportunities for everyone involved, especially for users:
“If you think about the time you spend online, connections with other people play an extremely important role, right? You message someone, you see things that other people have shared – people you know, or people that you don’t know, but that you respect and whose opinion you want to hear. All of these connections today only manifest themselves in walled gardens like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, just like the following that creators build through their content. ActivityPub addresses this problem and frees all these connections from the walled gardens.”
Due to the many decentralized instance owners, moderation could work better than in today’s mega-networks. Direct contact between content creators and followers could lead to better content, more sustainable advertising models and thus a better web, says Mike McCue. And who could help the Fediverse achieve a breakthrough? Ironically, the Facebook company Meta. Because he wants to bring his Twitter clone Threads to Fediverse. Flipboard is already taking this step and switching to ActivityPub.
“In addition to WordPress and Tumblr, Mozilla and Medium will probably also become more seriously involved in Fediverse. And if Threads becomes part of Fediverse, it’s not just about a huge group of users, but also about meta. That will bring a lot of companies into it , seriously think about the Fediverse. Especially for companies that run their own niche social networks, it will make a lot more sense to rely on ActivityPub. But I’m most excited about the new services, which we’re still hearing about know nothing, for example about start-ups.”