Growing the Open Social Web

Bit of a different one today. And by "different," I mean "actually posting to this blog for the first time in a while."

The good folks at FediForum will be facilitating an "unworkshop" on "Growing the Open Social Web" and they ask each participant to submit a "position paper" with their thoughts on and around the workshop topic to start to sort out a handful of common points for discussions and tracks.

The main thrust of mine, below, is: The Open Social Web's main value propositions are too hypothetical or intangible for most users. Tangible and differentiating value is the only main path to growth.

Currently, Open Social Web users come in a few different flavors: Builders, early adopters, alternative-seekers. There are differences between these audiences, but they all have inherent technical or ethical reasons to be interested. I've been on the Open Social Web since 2017 on Mastodon and trying to bring friends and family with me. Others without the above motivations see only "another social media app but it doesn't have my friends or the celebrities I follow." Where they even acknowledge differentiating features, they seem mostly irrelevant or too intangible to care about. "You own your own data" doesn't really mean anything to someone who is just scrolling FYP and posting occasionally. Anything that starts "and if Bluesky ever becomes evil or shuts down..." gets auto-completed to "...I stop using social media cause I'm not migrating again." If we wish to grow, we as builders must build genuinely useful and differentiating products that leverage the Open Social Web's unique capabilities: open data access and interoperability. Imagine for example, plugins for Shopify, Squarespace, and other e-commerce software that syncs shop inventory to an ATProto PDS and powers global search for small businesses, solving a discoverability issue every small business owner faces without locking them into exploitative marketplace platforms or even needing to coax them onto an open platform. Imagine displaying a business' items alongside their microblog posts, their smokesignal events tracking pop-ups and craft fairs, and how that list of integrations might continue to grow with the proliferation of services. This is the power of the open social web: meeting users where they are but still solving tangible problems for them. With a minimal amount of extra effort and all without locking them into a closed platform or trying to explain why your platform is different.