Do You Think The Future of Social Media is Distributed?
In other words, do you think platforms like Mastodon are the future of social media?
Will everyone own their data/content on social platforms and have their own private storage space for it?
It very much looks like Twitter is planning for this future. I'm super curious to get your thoughts on it from an angel investor point of view.
I think that these distributed platforms are amazing on technical level, but they always have far too much user friction and bad UX.
I would certainly consider backing someone who created a distributed/p2p social network that had a killer user experience.
Mastodon is just way to hard for an average user to grok.
I briefly tried the IndieWeb, specifically blogging tools.
The principles of distributed platforms are appealing. But, from what I saw, existing tools have a long way to go. They're too spartane and complex for ordinary users, i.e. the vast majority. They feel like work. A lot of arcane work.
You can't believe how many mobile users think they can install Android apps on their Windows or Mac laptops. I'm not sure ordinary users will go to the trouble of setting up their own private storage and making it work with distributed platforms and tools. They don't even do such a basic and technically trivial thing as stopping using Facebook.
If developers don't put huge effort into making their distributed tools dead-simple to use and operate, the IndieWeb and distributed social may remain yet another counterculture for a small and technically-literate elite.
I completely agree with this. Right now it feels like developers creating for other (crypto-obsessed) developers.
I'm really interested in abstracting away the "sausage making" part of distributed apps, while articulating the benefits to the end user. It's like the difference between using Git from the command line and, say, Dropbox (sorta — very rough comparison).
The very first experience someone has with a distributed app shouldn't be confirming their identity by putting a code snippet on a web server somewhere.
Even Mastodon, which is easy to get started with, takes a half-hour of reading to understand the federation stuff.
Any second now, someone is going to do a good job with this. I'm wondering if it's too late to be one of them ;-)
Your comparison is appropriate as the distributed social and the crypto communities live in a tech bubble. They should follow the official support forums of consumer products with billions of users, such as Google Play, to get an idea of the kinds of questions they ask and the tech divide they live in. It's a sobering experience.
Yup! This won't hold though. We're about to reach an inflection point there, I think. Someone who's passionate about UX is about to nail this, I'm sure.