Joshua Kushner’s Bedford is a social network for just two people

It’s a social network that doesn’t show you follower counts, doesn’t let you edit pictures, it automatically follows everyone in your phone book, and I dunno, it’s an app. Josh Constine wrote about it with his trademark froth, suggesting that “the future of social is multiplayer,” a statement that - and I say this respecting Josh otherwise - means ... See more

We’re already seeing this unbundling of consumer platforms starting within communities that have a deep affinity and sense of identity, and are not well served by general purpose social networks – for example, gaming communities assembling in virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox and using Discord to communicate, communities that coalesce aro... See more

Every year, centralized social networks place more restrictions on what users and developers can do. They seem to believe that limiting choices is the path to a healthy network, while the opposite is probably true. A decentralized social network can challenge this hypothesis by making two powerful promises that centralized networks cannot. They can... See more

Still, such micro-networks and the control they offer might redefine how we think about and use social media in the next decade, whether it is Cocoon or another app that follows in its wake.

I’ve seen many businesses trying to solve the problem of individuals getting together offline for activities. Existing solutions to this problem seem to be good enough; we can text easily to set up these plans.

Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more