new internet

The timeline isn’t settled.

The @-mention isn’t settled.

Nothing is settled. It’s 2003 again!

Users are leaving X, the most divisive and shouty social media platform, and it’s unlikely that alternatives like Bluesky will replace it. The era when arguing about politics on social media was America’s national pastime may be drawing to a close, with public discussions replaced by small group chats. With the decline of public argument platforms... See more

Also, much like a small homestead on a hundred acres, websites were closed ecosystems and isolated. There were no social networks or marketplace platforms to tap as a firehose channel for building an audience, and there was no real mechanism for ‘going viral’.

You had to grow your traffic the old fashioned way – by asking your digital neighbors for... See more

It's interesting to see how many people put "Twitter refugee" or something similar in their Bsky bios. Have people done that before when migrating to new platforms? I don't recall seeing "Friendster refugee" or "MySpace refugee" on newer platforms in the 00s.

Perhaps someday the human race will be ready to become one collective consciousness. But the experiment of the 2010s shows that this day is not today. Let the internet once more be an escape — a place where you can find your people and be happy. Let us learn to speak a thousand different languages once again. Let the Tower of Babel fall.

There’s a simple test you can do to tell if a website is a positive citizen of the web, or a negative one. Go to the website and look for their links; do they have any? Does the website link to other websites made by other people? Or do they just link to their own social media? How many outbound links do they have?

In short; is the website a dead... See more