Maybe I'll try posting daily/regularly as some kind of belated New Year's resolution. Any days that I actually turn the computer on, anyway. That's not all days, because some days I'm tired and I just stick to reading things on my phone.
Earlier today I was reading
an analysis of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 social media and
why virality sucks as a universal social media structure (I'd recommend checking the notes on both), and it just makes me wonder what Web 3.0 is going to be like. What I'm seeing the last couple years is a move back towards community settings, moderation, and anti-virality--Discord and Amino, in particular. Amino looks a lot like LiveJournal for the smartphone age--I'm not even sure it has a browser equivalent. When I signed up, it asked for my phone number, not an email. Unfortunately, it's exclusively 13+ content, which limits what people like me can really do with it. I suppose you could post links to a link, but still dicey with the TOS. Most fancreators want to be able to display porn, to put it bluntly. Many adults want to be able to discuss sex in general. If Amino introduces an 18+ mode, it could be the social media app of the next decade. If it doesn't, it's going to hamstring itself as a fandom and creative network, which appears to be its primary market. It also needs to introduce a way to mute chat notifications without muting the entire amino they come from, because my god is getting every single notification from the Dragon Age Roleplay main chat annoying. I think it eats my phone's battery, too. The constant notifications, not the app. (Though apparently battery issues are a thing with this model of phone, and it's actually about the processor. Long story short, I'm not getting a Motorola again. Especially if the model's been out for less than 6 months.) It is currently ad-free, always a plus.
Discord, meanwhile, is an ad-free chat client. It's very good at hosting chatrooms; it has "servers" with multiple "channels" that allow, say, a fandom group to operate multiple channels for different subjects. It's ad-free and a far smaller application than Skype, both on Windows and Android, and usually less laggy. It's basically replaced Skype and Google Hangouts for me and a number of people I know (without us coordinating that), though I still have the apps on my phone just in case. I still use Pidgin, but only really for F-list and as a less laggy way to deal with Hangouts on my ancient laptop. (Being poor sucks. Student loans suck. I'd have an extra $4k for stuff over the last year and a little if I didn't have student loans.) However, it's not an independent social media app. There's no way to ask to join a server without already having an invite code; in fact, you can't see the server's existence unless you're given a code for it. Even on mobile, it doesn't support links within the app. There's no such thing as a personal page or "permanent" posts (there is a pinning feature, but it's not the same), just the chat, nor any kind of image repository (unless you overclock the custom emojis). There are direct messages and servers, but there's no way to show anything to the general public, and if there were, I suspect it would still have tumblr-scale ephemerality problems. Discord needs at least one accessory site to function socially. It's more of a nice add-on to an existing social media experience than an independent social medium. (For example, all the servers I'm in are drawn from tumblr and/or AO3, and basically exist because neither of those sites have any kind of group chat capability--or any realtime chat capability, until tumblr introduced chats around two years ago. For the AO3 one, an author wanted to host chat parties, and for the other ones that I'm actually active on, people wanted to discuss tumblr politics in a more moderated space with a less scattered structure than reblogs, and then it also spawned some more general social interaction.) Discord does allow 18+ with age-locking, as well as having voice-chat and videocall support. It bills itself as "for gamers," so I believe it was originally developed to faciliate MMORPG campaigns and it could certainly be used for tabletop RPGs via conference calls, much like Skype sometimes is.
However, I think that the true biggest social medium of the upcoming 2020s has yet to be developed. Amino could be it, but I'm not sure it will be, even if it does go 18+--and the reason is funding. Discord and Amino are run by private companies. So far,
Amino has been funded by
Series A and B funding, and from reading between the lines of
Discord's Wikipedia page, it's something similar there. This means that, while things are sunny now, investors and owners will eventually try to monetize and datamine these apps, prioritizing revenue over user experience. Gradually, there will be ads and sponsored content and privacy erosion, paywalls for basic functionality, algorithms will replace user control, and harassment will be deliberately ignored because "someone is wrong on the internet" makes users spend a lot more time with the app open than generic, pleasant interactions. Sound familiar? It's because that's what's happened with tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype (and to a more invisible but equal extent, Google etc) over the last decade. In the next 5-10 years, and I'd put my money on the lower end of that, I foresee all those sites/apps except Google and maybe Facebook becoming socially irrelevant, as other things with more functionality step in to replace them. (And they'll be primarily smartphone-based. I really hope they'll have backwards compatibility with Windows or browsers, for the sake of people who can't afford new-model phones with tons of internal storage, or if an app temporarily goes down, or to enable non-members to see public posts [since account-walls just make people lose interest], but they'll be primarily aimed at mobile users.)
But any new social media will follow this cycle of monetization and decay unless the underlying structure is changed. It doesn't matter what promises are made in the beginning; as the site grows, and it's going to have to grow if it's good, operating costs and investor appeasement will eventually take priority. If we want user-friendly social media, we have to decorporatize social media. Web 3.0 has to be crowdfunded, user-owned, and not-for-profit, or nothing will really change.
We've already seen Dreamwidth, AO3/the OTW, and Wikipedia use this model. The occasional banner ads for pledge drives are far less annoying than standard ads on other sites. Users who have spare cash donate to keep the site running because they value its services and understand the peril of allowing a for-profit corporation to run our social lives or control our information access or host our transformative works, but at the same time, it's not required in order to use the service. Donation can be socially encouraged by little badges on usernames or similar, but it doesn't gate any significant service or any accessibility feature.This model gives the site administrators and moderators a sense of obligation to the users--one that can be made very real if displeased donors stop giving, tying revenue to user experience--and makes the site immune to pressure from outside forces that would try to restrict content. (I.E., Strikethrough of old, or, more recently, Patreon's Paypal-driven TOS update.) I can see allowing users to place ads on their own pages, even taking a small cut from it, but never making such a thing mandatory or introducing sponsored content or ads disguised as ordinary posts.
I admit I don't know how well this would work when translated to a tumblr-sized social media network. Dreamwidth and AO3 have relatively small userbases. But if Wikipedia can do it (and so far it doesn't appear to have been secretly bought out by anyone at an infrastructure level to skew information), then it should be possible for a social medium to do it. Onward to Web 3.0!