If you look at the state of social media these days, you know what it is. The major players are all controlled by billionaires in the relentless pursuit of growth and profit, underscored, in many cases, by their shareholders. And those billionaires are kowtowing to the increasingly authoritarian government of the country they're situated in. The result is devolving into a situation that is, not merely useless, but actively harmful. My fiancee has already ditched conventional social media, and I would, too, if there weren't good reasons I had to retain a presence there. Ben Werdmuller's keynote transcript, Why the open social web matters now, is just one of the latest things that underscores the point.
It doesn't have to be like this. In some ways, the old days were better.
Social media, or social networking, or "virtual community" as we called it in the beginning, wasn't always in the form of megaliths with millions upon millions of users. The WELL, the site that influenced the original Electric Minds, never got above five figures in terms of user count. CommunityWare was designed to host multiple "communities," but communities didn't have to be very large; some of them had single-digit user counts. By the time Electric Minds moved to Venice, the number of users had dwindled to a few dozen die-hards, but we kept it going for years, welcoming the occasional newcomer who found their way in. Similar communities running off old phpBB or vBulletin instances might have anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of members.
There's something to be said for those old, smaller communities, where you could be sure of the person who's running it, and the administrators, in turn, could be sure about all the "regulars" and be able to easily spot newbies that needed encouragement...or troublemakers that needed to be dealt with. When you could be sure that what you saw was because some human wrote it and decided it needed to be there, not an AI or a faceless algorithm. When community meant people, not just "content."
At the same time, I don't think people want to necessarily be "walled in" to a single site, even one hosting multiple communities the way CommunityWare did. This dictates a certain degree of "distributed" operation, similar to what Mastodon did for microblogging (Twitter-alike) sites, or XMPP did for instant messaging.
I'm working on "reviving" Venice's concept, in a newly-developed application. My first goal is to get it to all the functionality the original Venice had as of the last time I worked on it (2006 or so), but then "go beyond" that...and part of this should be figuring out how to "syndicate" communities between multiple independent server instances. Easy sharing to services like Mastodon should also be part of this.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the solution to producing distributed, billionaire-proof communities were to be found in code that we abandoned nearly two decades ago?