On personal websites and social web

It’s a gloomy afternoon and I’m taking a quick break from client work to drink a cup of tea and write down a few thoughts on something I’ve found myself reflecting on often lately.

I’m currently restructuring my RSS library. I started using Feedbin—and the reason why I did that is something I’m going to blog about in the future—and I’m following a lot more people. One thing I noticed is that many of those people have written their thoughts on the current state of the web when it comes to social media, the fediverse, and blogs. And in those posts, I’m starting to see a trend of some sort. People are apparently starting to split into two camps that follow two very different ideological approaches when it comes to being social on the web. And when I say “people” I mean tech people, those who care about this type of stuff.

On the one side, you have those who are big proponents of the fediverse, who believe in ActivityPub, and have faith in this idea of recreating the social media experience in a more open and decentralised way.

On the other you have the people who are realising that maybe the solution is not to recreate social media but rather to abandon it and go back to a more deliberate way to be social online, using personal sites, small forums, emails, and other “traditional” tools. I’m obviously part of this second group.

And I find it interesting how both camps are responding to the same initial output: the fact that traditional social media is failing at the “social” part. But they’re responding in completely different ways.

I still believe the first approach is doomed to fail. Because the issue with social media is not the tech, but the people. If you let enough people congregate in the same space some issues will inevitably arise. Grifters are gonna grift, scammers will try to scam, hustlers will hustle, influencers are gonna try to influence, and business people will try to monetise everything. It’s no surprise that Meta is slowly entering that space with Threads. And I don’t see Meta starting a blog platform next, letting everyone share and connect via RSS. So that alone tells me which approach is more appealing to the exact same entities we’re trying to get away from.

Having said that I’m hopeful. I do think people are slowly starting to realise that you can get immense human value from the web outside of traditional social media. You have to work for it but it’s absolutely worth it.