Social Networks & Sociable Protocols

How will people interact with each other over the Internet in the future?

I want to carve out a space in your mind for something that I think is coming soon: sociable protocols

Social Protocols - These were built at the beginning of the Internet. They allowed individuals who knew each others’ contact details to contact each other. Groups could form over email threads (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and IRC Channels (Internet Relay Chat). These protocols were really powerful for communication but they were unable to store important state like images, comments, replies and social context.

Social Networks - MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn lead the charge to map out people’s relationships on the Internet. They used the best technology that they had access to at the time: a Delaware Corporation and racks of privately owned servers. This concentrated enormous amounts of power and capital in the hands of a few Silicon Valley CEOs and their moderation teams.

Sociable Networks - When I enter a room on Clubhouse, laugh at TikTok video, reply to someone on Twitter, or watch someone share some knowledge on YouTube, I find a different part of my brain is lighting up. It is a sociable interaction where I am connecting with someone outside my circles. I think of the products that are produced by these companies as encouraging new kinds of socialising.

What is Sociable Protocol?

I think the Internet and the people of the planet are ready for sociable protocols that are not controlled by people who look like me in Silicon Valley. We need to swing the pendulum away from top-down digital dictatorships that are incorporated in Delaware.

The large social properties on the Internet are all controlled by small groups of men in California. The people who craft the feed algorithms are anonymous and un-elected dictators of what we see day-to-day.

To me, a Sociable Protocol must meet a few tests:

Permanent data storage - We cannot keep locating our social connections and memories inside servers controlled by for-profit companies. Companies emerged to plug the gaps in the Internet that the technologists simply could not fill. The connections between people should be controlled by the people, not by companies. That information is part of our social fabric and when we define those relationships inside for-profit companies, it gets abused. The sociable protocol must re-capture our social data in new ways.

The work being done by Arweave to host NFTs points us in the right direction.

Un-censorable developer access - Anyone with an idea should be able to interact with the data and connections with people’s permission. Developers must know that they can build a product that uses this protocol without fear of being removed.

Ric Burton 🇬🇧 ‣ 🇺🇸 🦇🔊 @ricburton

I really think the ground is set for a new set of social networks that run on open protocols that anyone can build upon. The world has woken up to what happens when you let a few dudes control billions of minds. Now developers have to build a bridge to a better way of doing it.

yosnier @Yosnier_

why would instagram, a photo sharing app, replace the notifications section with a shopping tab

Community-controlled censorship - I believe censorship should happen at the app layer, not the protocol layer. You can email child porn but Gmail will not show it to you. You might want Donald Trump removed, but I want to hear from the sitting President. People must be able to choose apps that tap into a common protocol with different censorship levels depending on different communities’ desires.

Ric Burton 🇬🇧 ‣ 🇺🇸 🦇🔊 @ricburton

~1,000 central bankers control the money ~1,000 moderators control the social networks ~1,000 engineers control the feed algorithms The decisions these people make about our money, our moderation, and our minds affect every human being on earth We must decentralise it all

Open source feed algorithms - The systems that control what we see on our feeds have a profound impact on our mental health and understanding of the world. A sociable protocol would allow developers to offer new kinds of algorithms to communities who want to see the world in different ways. I am meticulous about the apps I install on my phone and use every day—I want to do the same for my algorithms.

Bobby Goodlatte @rsg

Engagement algorithms are now the invisible hand of speech. Tweets are more & more crafted in pursuit of reach rather than authenticity. Culturally that's quite toxic. And politically, it's disastrous to have politicians who "govern by algorithm" as @GeoffLewisOrg puts it.

Mike Solana @micsolana

social validation is a drug, and many of the most powerful people alive are addicts. this is not ideal! also: the misinformation we love, voting for truth, and slowing down the runaway train. https://t.co/skviB904MI

Why do people care?

So many people’s livelihood depend on social networks today. They are the top of the funnel for the products we buy, new job opportunities, and audiences we can build.

Jeff Morris Jr. @jmj

Beyond format, the most important product innovation of TikTok is helping creators build a massive audience very quickly. Every Instagram creator I know left the platform when they realized this. In social, your algorithm is your core product.

TikTok’s rise shows us that the battle for better attention algorithms is still being fought. Clubhouse’s rise shows us that new ways of meeting new people can always emerge. The ground is ripe for experimentation in sociable software.

Naval @naval

Followers are like frequent flier miles - great until you try and use them for something.

The political backdrop is also really present in people’s minds. Whatever you think about Trump, you have to think carefully about his removal from Twitter.

John Robb @johnrobb

This goes way beyond Trump. Disconnecting a politician from social networking = loss of political viability. Corporations can now unilaterally dictate who can and cannot be a politician. Does anyone else see the BIG problem with this?

Twitter can remove everything you have built overnight. For example: one of my favourite accounts run by Jack Butcher—the @value handle—was removed for no discernible reason. He spent years building up an audience around it.

Jack Butcher @jackbutcher

There is no such thing as platform risk 🤮

What will the hook be?

I signed up for Facebook because a friend tagged me in some photos he took of me. That was the hook for social networks for a very long time: your friends can see you.

What will be the thing that hooks people into sociable protocols? I don’t have the answer but here are a few ideas about how the flywheel might start turning.

Ric Burton 🇬🇧 ‣ 🇺🇸 🦇🔊 @ricburton

When Facebook added tagging to images, it kicked off the social networking revolution When Ethereum added the NFT standard to images, it kicked off the sociable protocol revolution Metadata and monetary data around images can now flow freely across open data protocols

What we see with NFTs is a return of creative scarcity and status emerging around ownership. It feels like a core component to the trend is the ability to make money from perceived taste.

d.mirror.xyz 🌫 @Iiterature

Buying is the new liking.

Earning is way more powerful than getting likes. If those two elements can be interwoven into the fabric of a network, it will mean people can make money from their time in new ways. Today, the bluntest tool in social is where you build an audience and then try to sell to it. We are going to see so many new experiments around paying people for content creation, sophisticated moderation and other forms of Internet work.

Ian 💭 @ianIDEO

DAOs are social networks. People don’t understand how big of a deal this is and will be.

Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are starting to pay people a lot of money for work they submit to the systems they represent. Over time, you can imagine people’s working relationships being defined by their contributions to these systems.

It really feels like something has to emerge with crypto principles from the ground up. It cannot come from a typical startup team who has no appreciation for the nuances of these protocols.

Jai Bhavnani @jai_bhavnani

How long till we see a crypto based social network in the top 10 on app stores? Not shoehorned in crypto features but built from the bottom up with crypto in mind

What will not work in this space?

I find it helps to try and define what I think will not happen to free up mental space for stuff that might. It helps me think about the kinds of things I do want to see and why.

There have been a few crude attempts at building social networks that are slapped onto a blockchain. They feel like the worst of all worlds: bad products with none of the network effects of a protocol.

Ric Burton 🇬🇧 ‣ 🇺🇸 🦇🔊 @ricburton

I am not talking about a feed of photos and text *on the blockchain* I am not talking about some kind of system where people can *control their data* Those aren’t selling points It has to be something magic that is only possible now A new kind of internet interaction 👽🧙‍♂️🔮

I do not believe this will come from a team of wealthy engineers at Twitter through their Bluesky initiative. New technological revolutions come from young teams with nothing to lose and a totally new perspective.

Ric Burton 🇬🇧 ‣ 🇺🇸 🦇🔊 @ricburton

I want to be able to choose my own algorithmic adventure I want to choose my own client I want an open source social protocol that lots of developers build on I want a lively ecosystem of interfaces and experiences I want to choose my own censorship It will not be @bluesky

The right project will likely create an enormous network effect with lots of developers using it to share common state among social apps.

Who is working in this space?

I am paying close attention to Zora, Foundation, Showtime, Mirror and a few other teams that have not announced their projects yet. In each case, these teams are starting with the content and building systems around it.

Zora ☼☽ @ourZORA

“Decentralized social networks are like the original vision of the Internet, globally distributed and owned by no one.” — @Flynnjamm

jammsession.mirror.xyzDecentralized Social Networks — MirrorIn traditional social networks, our feed is created from scratch based on who we follow, who we interact with, and what we post. Eugene Wei’s famous status-as-a-service essay was the holy grail of social media, describing how participants behave in new platforms. Status was the scarce asset, and par…

In Mirror’s case, I love how they are beginning with the author experience and building up desirable content around it. This thread from one of the founders on cryptoeconomic networks is truly fantastic:

p.mirror.xyz @patrickxrivera

decentralized protocols aren't social networks. they're cryptoeconomic networks instead of "come for the creator, stay for the network", I think the mantra of creator-focused protocols will be more like "come for the creator, stay for the economy." here's the difference

We have also seen the rise of Bitclout, which seems to tap into the basest form of influencer marketing by giving everyone a market cap. It is a really clever hack.

Andy Artz @artzandy

1/ For the last 4 weeks, millions of users from around the world have been conducting a social experiment on bitclout.com. We've been playing with a decentralized social media platform that no single company controls. No Jack. No Zuck. No Evan.

bitclout.comWelcome to BitClout

I think these explorations are absolutely fascinating. However, I bet that in 2030 we will all look back at the obvious winner in this space and be surprised. I keep thinking about the kind of person who will lead this. If I was to guess, I bet they will be:

Young - The energy required to lead a new movement will be monumental

Fast - Shipping products and protocols rapidly is incredibly rare and hard

Crypto-native - Their brain will have formed around the ideas in crypto

Community-driven - The CEOs of social network are kings, we need leaders

I hope I get to reflect on this post in a few years and see something starting to fill the gap that is there in my brain. I hope developers are able to ship amazing products on a sociable protocol we can all contribute to. I hope people are simply attracted away from Zuckerberg’s fiefdom and onto more plentiful pastures. I will leave you with a chilling and inspiring thought from a piece called The Crypto State?:

In an essay published in 2017, Mark Zuckerberg offers a philosophy of history to explain the rise of Facebook. The arc of that history moves from tribes to cities to nations—and now to something beyond.

If you are working on that something beyond, please let me know.