What if personal websites could replace traditional social media networks as the primary vehicle for sharing content on the Internet?
Back in the 90s, if you wanted to share information on the Internet, you created a personal website. There was a fairly steep learning curve, limiting access to those few willing to put in sufficient elbow grease. Today, social media is the de facto method for sharing information online. Networks like Facebook, Instagram and X provide some attractive features that were simply not available on the traditional personal website:
- Super easy to use, no technical skills or complex setup required.
- A very low barrier to post — just type a few words, maybe pick a photo, and you’re done.
- A rewarding feedback loop in the form of likes, replies and re-posts from family, friends and followers.
- The “network” effect, meaning most of the people you know are on the platform.
- The ability to make your content public or limited to people you know.
- They’re “free”.
Social media companies have done well to provide software that keeps users coming back. Unfortunately, these companies have also made lots of decisions along the way that are decidedly against the interest of their users:
- While users may technically own their content, they relinquish full use and access to the network, and networks deliberately make it hard or impossible to export your data and move it somewhere else.
- They use proprietary formats, protocols and APIs that are deliberately incompatible with other networks or websites. By offering the service for free, these companies paid to collect that valuable data and they have no incentive to let it go.
- They minimize posting updates and maximize display of algorithmic content designed to keep users hooked via emotionally charged and divisive messages. The vast majority of time spent on social networks is consuming, not creating content. Studies have repeatedly shown that such curated content consumption has resulted in numerous harms to society and mental health.
- They collect and leverage every post, photo and action taken on the network for targeted advertising, manipulation via algorithmic content and training AI models.
The big social networks are free for the vast majority of users, and many even pay top content creators. But few users ever really consider what they’re giving up in exchange for that free service. The actual per-user cost to run a typical social media network is tiny, and the social media companies are profiting tens of billions of dollars per year on their “free” service.
Thankfully, there are better options. A number of open platforms, protocols, and APIs have emerged as a direct response to frustration with the closed, proprietary, and data-extractive nature of traditional social media giants. The core idea is to decentralize social networking, giving users more control over their data, identity, and content.
A review of these would be an entire post, so I’ll just briefly list the big ones:
- ActivityPub is a W3C-recommended open standard and protocol for decentralized social networking. Around it has grown an ecosystem of open source social media platforms to replace the likes of X (Mastodon), Instagram (Pixelfed) and YouTube (PeerTube). All of these platforms speak the same underlying language, and anyone can host their own instance or write software that interoperates with them.
- The AT protocol is similar to ActivityPub, but differs in several technical areas. It’s primary implementation is BlueSky, which is closed source software owned by a corporation. While BlueSky is a benefit corporation, it is still ultimately profit-driven and beholden to its venture capital investors.
- Blockchain’s tamper-proof and decentralized architecture provides the basis for some interesting but still experimental social protocols like Farcaster, Lens and Nostr.
- There are a number of interesting infrastructure-level protocols that focus on decentralization, tamper-resistance and autonomous governance like IPFS and Filecoin for storage or ICP and Fluence for compute. While these aren’t for end-users, they provide a viable back-bone for decentralized Internet services.
Unfortunately, these alternatives have yet to catch on in a meaningful way. Meta and X still massively dominate Internet attention and participation. Perhaps a new breed of decentralized and open social media will ascend and eventually overtake the big players. Or perhaps they’ll grow just large enough to bring the big players back in line with the interests of their end users. Either way, I envision a rocky road ahead.
As I’ve been learning about this stuff and tinkering with this website, I’m reminded that a personal website is still the most flexible, standards-based, and widely accessible “home” for what a person may want to share on the Internet. Websites can be programmed to do anything, so there’s nothing stopping a personal website from also doing things you might expect from a social media network, like:
- Effortlessly re-posting content to any open or otherwise accessible social protocol or network.
- Aggregating posts and feeds of interest from open protocols or other accessible networks.
- Responding to and displaying feedback on re-posts, likes and replies from syndicating networks.
In addition to social network integration, personal websites offer a number of things no single social network or app can, such as:
- Providing a permanent “home” on the Internet that is fully owned and controlled by the end user.
- The ability to add software and features from different sources or custom software written by the end user.
- Allowing for full design customization.
- The ability to host it on any number of platforms, centralized or decentralized, allowing the end-user to move it freely between platforms.
- The ability to self-host on a home computer.
- Complete end-user ownership and custody of all the data.
As of this writing, this site is running on WordPress and hosted on a computer running in my home. I own and control the domain it uses and the hardware it runs on. I use Cloudflare for DNS, but only because it’s the best of many options available. So I’ve ticked most of the boxes for a personal website, but what about the social interaction part of it?
This whole line of thinking feels like a fun challenge. If I treat this site like a proof of concept, how close can I get it to this vision of the personal website also being one’s central social media hub? I’m guessing I can do a lot of this with plugins. And where I can’t, I can write my own. I don’t regularly read social feeds and haven’t posted on social media in many years, but I do have accounts that I can test with on all the platforms. Some aspects of this integration will be impossible due to the walls that social media companies put up. But at least for the open protocols, I know its possible.
Let’s see where this goes.
Continued at The Social Website — Update.
