On Social Media Stability

Social media has two large issues - you have to have servers with space and bandwidth to handle a users requests and you have to moderate the users at least enough that Nazis don't show up

Most places solve the problems with money, but then you need money, which means getting it from your users somehow. (or going broke, like Cohost)

• You could charge people for entry, but that limits your user base substantially. Why pay for something that is free elsewhere?
• Donations are doable (see Mastodon, which has many different people running interoperable servers that run on donations) but that requires a level of popularity among nerds that care about server costs, so that ends in a lot of failing projects.
• You can get it from investors and put the problem off until later, who invariably ask you to fuck over your users to extract money from them weather they want to or not.

Decentralization

One of the best solutions to that problem I've ever heard is to offload these problems onto the user. But it doesn't actually exist yet. Though it could! Getting onto the App store is annoying, but it's the sort of thing that a nerd with disposable free time and income can do on their own. Those kind of decentralized open standards are conveniently hard to kill and hard to monetize, so I'm very hopeful.

Of extant projects, Have you heard about Mastodon? I'm genuinely unsure, I'm in a bit of a bubble. It solves the problem by offloading it onto a multitude of server owners, instead of just one. The servers can choose to talk to each other, act as if they are one server. If one guy runs out of money and fails, it's users can migrate through an automated system to another server, without data loss. If a server fails to keep the Nazis out, everybody else can just ignore them. It's not a terrible system, and it already exists to be built upon. I already spend a lot of time there, though I don't have an account.

Who cares?

All of this comes with a pretty big caveat though, which is that you maybe shouldn't listen to me about social media. Stability and morality of a website is important to me, but isn't the only important thing. The kinds of people who will show up to the kinds of sites that run on donations are the kinds of people who think independence, stability, and interoperability is valuable in a social media site: nerds, activists, and friends of nerds or activists. Not your grandma probably. For all that this stuff is important, if nobody you like is on the site, then you're not going to show up, no matter how long it has existed and will exist.

These spaces also have extra friction points. It's like two factor authentication, the little steps that we add to make the world a better place are to most people a constant and unnecessary annoyance. Nobody wants to have to chose what kind of fop twitter to sign up for. The general populace does not think about data privacy enough to steer the market away from misbehaving.

Instead of listening to me, you should listen to the people in your life who actually use social media. You will enjoy any social media site a lot more with the people you like on them. The sites who care about stability will likely still be here when whatever site you're using becomes terrible again, and may be big enough to matter at that point. If we build good enough systems, in social media and elsewhere, we may be able to simply outlive the terrible ones.