This is what I liked about the open blogosphere of 2000 to 2008. Whereas something like Twitter is optimized for the fast-take and the brutal one-liner, blogs allowed actual conversations. You could write something serious, develop the idea, and maybe some other people would engage with it, also at a serious level. But then the walled-gardens began to gain ground (Facebook, Twitter, and then later Instagram) and the era of the blogs came to an end. (Yes, they still exist, but they most exist as standalone essays, not engaged in conversation with other blogs.)
To my mind, the blogosphere had a lot to do with political polarization. Once you added a comment widget to a blog it was easy to build a following of very devoted fans who would argue on the blogger's behalf, amplify them diligently etc. Certainly blogs could foster thoughtful discourse with a wide variety of inputs, but they were just as likely to foster combative tribalism. One interesting example of a blog that followed this path only to later reverse course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Footballs
When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.
Of course, you could have said the same thing about gopher v usenet, web pages v blogs, blogs v social media, social media v defederation etc. A new medium becomes available that is less centralized, early adopters hop onto it (either to gain a voice or amplify an existing voice in a new space), followings/fandoms/communities emerge (and often clash), and eventually a meta-tribal identity develops around the new medium as being in tension with the old one.
Over the longer term there's a huge move away from centralized mass media publishing and the huge capital pools required to establish and compete in that market. This increases autonomy and opportunity and fosters greater diversity, but in the absence of clear market signals rhetoric is often substituted for reliable information, and influence by capital (political or financial) persists while being less visible or accountable.
> When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.
Most people take extreme personal offense at the concept of diversity of opinion. A common platform is always, without exception, a way to unify opinions, not diversify them.
Malcolm Galdwell discussed the trend away from “mainstreaming” and its social impacts on his Revisionist History podcast recently in the episode series beginning with “When Will Met Grace”
Very few did. And some of those that did in that era are still around, and they don't allow that now.
I don't think it had anything to do with walled gardens, it had to do with the fact that political polarization wasn't quite complete yet. It's getting there.
We used to do the same thing in Newsgroups. It was a sad couple of years when the ones I used to hang out in slowly hollowed out as people migrated to web forums, which was inevitable, as more and more people came onboard and chose the "easiest" route to other people who were into whatever obscure interest you suddenly had a community for.
Usenet was limited to nerds and nerd-adjacent people who were shown, on a one-to-one basis, how to use it. My uncle logged me into the local university's mainframe when I was a kid in the mid-80s, absent that influence I would've jumped onboard with everyone else in the late 90s, probably.
After the extreme efficiency of desktop Usenet clients, where I could traverse and keep up with many communities in one easy interface, with exactly the text size and font I wanted, I never really joined any web forums to speak of. I would've had to create an account on a different site for every single interest, most web forums had appalling crayon interfaces with zero sorting options or anything like that, they were all functionally corrals rather than intersections. There was no way to efficiently cover that many communities anymore, and the act of engaging had become detestable, but only in the context of what was lost; for those just arriving it was brilliant.
I wish there was a word for the expression on my face right now. Once you've been on the internet for any length of time, you start looking back to a better one in the past. It's probably one of those internet laws, like Moore's.
One of the problems I recall with such mailing-list-based discussion groups was that participants had an expectation that the discussions would stay in the group, and that members wouldn't dump such semi-private conversations (which might have included various controversial takes, etc.) onto the larger web - but in many cases, that did happen, with resulting blowback for individuals whose comments were taken out of context.
The expectation of any kind of clearly attributable group discussion on the web remaining private appears to be long-gone. Even with closed, in-house corporate or institutional discussion groups, it's likely everything is logged and recorded for review by management at their whim. It's all depressingly Orwellian these days.
This is the exact reason I started working on Satellite. To be a platform where I could have a blog that talked to other blogs. If you have feedback I'd love to hear it.
It's interesting. It'll be interesting to see how you address moderation and boosting. Since your federation page is "coming soon" and your handles appear to be globally unique, it's unclear to me who the moderators are and how you will deal with spam (defined as content that I, as a user, don't want).
And perhaps consider "bootstrapping" with external content. Take a place where content is legal to reproduce and select the stuff that reflects what you want your network to be, then mirroring it. Give external authors from your content source separate identities on your system; and tag the content with the original source. StackOverflow allows this, for example (don't do this as a crappy SEO technique; rather do it in such a way where passers-by can see the kind of content you want to exist on the site).
I've spent about ten minutes poking around that link and I'm still not at all sure what kind of tool Satellite either is or wants me to think of it as. Front page:
> Satellite is an alternative space for writers and the beginning of an entirely new kind of network
O...k? Alternative to what? New how? Presumably "alternative" here means the space is an alternative to other spaces (not a space for alternatives) and "new" means "there are features other things don't have" (not "we made it a week ago") but it's very vague branding. What are the commonly-known alternatives so I have an existing idea to latch on to? What are the new features? Moving on, it appears that wasn't actually the front page - clicking through to the named front page:
> a free, open, and unstoppable network better aligned with the interests of humanity
To do what! I gather this is a writing platform, but is it akin to blogging where individuals regularly put out articles? Scientific publishing that enforces a web of citations? Both? Can I have friends/subscribers of sorts? If so, do they also have to be Satellite members? Do my posts appear on any sort of front page anywhere? I'm still very befuddled at how the tool wants me to use it. Mastodon seems like the closest competitor, what does Satellite bring to the party?
> Open protocols and data ownership
Great! I like those things. But I'm only going to choose to use a tool if it has those things after it satisfies my primary use cases. Using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail is stupid if you do it just because the screwdriver has an open source CAD file somewhere.
I'm sorry if this all comes across as harsh -- I'm trying to be as straightforward as possible. I'm not at all certain if I'm Satellite's target audience, but if I am I am already disinclined to try and find out more. Tech bro hype over trivial things (or even stupid things) has completely burnt me out on new web stuff that tries too hard and doesn't respect my attention. I very much appreciate tools that are a little opinionated and a lot forthcoming about their intended uses so I don't feel like my attention has been hijacked or co-opted. If the tool is for me, great. I know what my pains are and it's not difficult for me to imagine what it might take for them to go away and you'll win me over if I can fit you into that thought. If the tool is not for me, that's also fine! It might be for someone else. But I'm not going to spend the effort to figure that out. If I have to, it's already not for me.
That said, the website is very pretty. I'm always a fan of those dynamical network images, and the layout & typographical styling is very appealing.
I'm so close to the product after building it that it's not obvious to me which things are not obvious to other people seeing it for the first time, so thank you, this is very valuable feedback!
> is it akin to blogging where individuals regularly put out articles
Sort of. I think of being modeled after a text-based subreddit.
> Scientific publishing that enforces a web of citations
It's doesn't enforce citations, but it does have a credibility mechanism. That's what the "stars" on each item are supposed to be doing. When a writer stars another person's article, a link gets created to them in the constellation. The constellation is intended to visualize the web of ideas that connects people. It could probably be improved upon to be more functional and not just an art piece!
> Can I have friends/subscribers of sorts?
Yes. Other people on Satellite can subscribe to you, and people can also subscribe to get new posts sent to them via email without having to make an account. In this sense it's similar to Substack.
> Do my posts appear on any sort of front page anywhere?
Yes. All posts appear on the front page immediately under the "new" feed. Top-starred posts appear on the front page under the "top" feed. The subscribed feed just filters the posts from people who you're subscribed to.
> I'm still very befuddled at how the tool wants me to use it.
Basically the idea is you post articles and comment on other peoples articles. Everyone has a their own blog page at /@<username>
> Mastodon seems like the closest competitor, what does Satellite bring to the party?
The biggest difference is that every post on Satellite is digitally signed. Satellite supports signing with a local wallet, but it's not required. Another thing Satellite offers is data permanence. Every 28 days, all the data is archived in a kind of "snapshot" and added to IPFS as a kind of insurance for users that the value of their contributions won't be totally lost, even if Satellite shuts down (which is one problem with Mastodon, that all your data depends on being hosted by one instance). Another thing thing that archiving does is that makes the network "forkable" which I think is going to be an important part of how social media works in the future.
> If the tool is not for me, that's also fine! It might be for someone else.
In any case, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage :)
> The biggest difference is that every post on Satellite is digitally signed
that's not a very compelling difference for most people. Definitely not enough to get other people to sign up and follow you on it.
I've followed hundreds of people with no form of validation and I just don't care. It's good to know that the account claiming to be the president is actually the president's account (and other similar political or popular figures) but for the other 99% i really don't have to worry that it's someone else pretending to be them.
And then there's the fact that signing only proves that it's the same account holder posting not that they're who they claim to be.
The snapshot to IPFS is ... meh. Most people don't care about what they said on a microblog a year ago, and very few have a clue what IPFS is, or how they'd do anything with an IPFS backup.
The problem with a mastodon instance shutting down is only slightly about the lost data. It's much more about the lost account and connection to your followers and the people you follow.
Nothing you've said sounds bad. They're nifty things, but they're also not compelling enough to overcome the network effect on other networks and they're not features I can actively use that offer me something notable i can't get elsewhere.
