Costs
Part of Which early social network truly came first, and why does no one agree
Trends in early social networks: what a revival can and cannot restore
Trends returning early social networks to smaller rooms: what the revival trades away, how federation repeats an old shape, and what cannot come back.
Early social networks keep returning in the old shapes: invitation-only small groups, feeds in posting order, one-person servers for known people, and independent sites linked by hand. The services that carried those shapes had names — Six Degrees, Friendster, LiveJournal, MySpace — and the names keep changing while the shapes do not.
Each revival is announced as new, yet each is a return. The question is not whether the old forms are better. It is what each trade asks you to give up, and who gives it up now who did not before.
This page treats the revivals as a set of trades. The forms outlast the services that carry them: the shapes that Six Degrees, Friendster and MySpace held up are now held by Mastodon, Lemmy, Micro.blog and Bluesky, under different names and the same trade-offs.
What to take away
- The early forms are being revived because the costs of scale have become visible: moderation, ranking, standing that cannot leave.
- Each revival keeps one property of the early web and pays for it with another. Small spaces lose reach; chronological feeds lose discovery; self-hosting loses convenience.
- The people paying are the ones who have already had the large-scale experience and know what they are giving up. That is different from the first time, when nobody knew.
Why the old forms return
Large services fixed early forms' problems of being hard to find and hard to reach. In doing so, they created problems early forms did not have.
Ranked feeds decide what is seen, and moderation is impossible to do well at the scale that ranking requires. Standing accumulates and cannot be exported, so leaving means starting over, so degradation is tolerated.
The arguments under critiques of social media are, read one way, a list of the reasons someone might go back.
The move to small groups is a decision about costs, not a mood.
The trades
What it recovers
- Small, invitation-only groups
- Norms taught by example; conversation among people who recognize each other
- Chronological feeds
- Seeing what your connections posted, in order, with no system deciding for you
- Federated servers
- A community that owns its container and can move it, with a path to other communities
- Independent personal sites
- Total control of presentation and no landlord
- Long-form threaded discussion
- A record; slow conversation that can continue for years
What it pays
- Small, invitation-only groups
- Reach; the group cannot grow past the point where example fails, and it knows it
- Chronological feeds
- Discovery; nothing surfaces that you did not already choose to follow
- Federated servers
- Convenience; someone has to run the server, pay for it, and moderate it, and that someone is a volunteer
- Independent personal sites
- Audience; a site nobody links to is a site nobody finds, and the linking has to be done by hand
- Long-form threaded discussion
- Speed and presence; the form is unsuited to the immediate
None of the trades is obviously right. Each is right for people who value the left column more than the right.
A dated example is the return of invitation-only forums: private Discourse instances, many set up after 2019, where a few hundred people can talk without a ranking algorithm.
What Each Revived Form Trades
Revived form
- Small invite-only groups
- Norms by example
- Chronological feeds
- Posts in order
- Federated servers
- Community owns container
- Independent personal sites
- Total control
- Long-form threaded discussion
- A record
What it recovers
- Small invite-only groups
- Reach
- Chronological feeds
- Discovery
- Federated servers
- Convenience
- Independent personal sites
- Audience
- Long-form threaded discussion
- Speed and presence
What it pays
- Small invite-only groups
- Chronological feeds
- Federated servers
- Independent personal sites
- Long-form threaded discussion
The revival services, by name
- Mastodonfederated microblogging; anyone can run a server, and members of different servers follow each other through ActivityPub.
- Lemmya federated link aggregator run the same way, built for threaded discussion rather than short posts.
- Micro.bloga hosted service where small independent blogs and their authors form a community, with no ranking algorithm over the top.
- Blueskya single network built on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, closer to a service than a federation.
- Discourseopen-source forum software for private, invitation-only rooms; a private instance is a server one group owns, ordered by time rather than a ranking algorithm.
The private instance and the hosted small room are the same trade at different levels of effort: one asks for a server and the time to run it, the other asks only that you trust someone else to run it.
Federation: a new form with an old shape
The one genuinely new element is federation: separate servers, run by different people, that exchange messages by a shared protocol. A member of one can follow a member of another.
Federation is not new. The Usenet newsgroups of the 1980s and the mailing lists that followed used the same shape: separate servers exchanging messages by agreement.
The fediverse is the general term for networks built this way. The shape is the old mailing list and distributed discussion system, where no single operator held the whole, applied to the social network form.
It recovers the property that a community owns its container. The internet communities page treats that as the difference between renting a room and having one.
It pays for that property exactly as early forms did: someone must run the machine unpaid, and moderation across servers is negotiated between volunteers with different norms. ActivityPub, the protocol standardized by the W3C in 2018, is the common language for many federated servers.
The size question, again
Small groups work because they hold norms without writing them down. One person can hold only so many people as individuals. Dunbar's number is the usual name for that ceiling, whatever its exact value.
Communities under it behave differently from communities over it. The early web mostly lived under it because it could not grow.
The ceiling is not a fixed number; it varies with the time and attention a person can give. A small server run by a hobbyist for a few dozen friends stays under it by design. The exact figure is debated.
What it delivers is the thing the early social networks page describes as the earlier shape, where the unit of identity was the place and the reach was the room.
What the revival cannot bring back
Standing does not transfer. A person who moves to a small space leaves their audience behind.
The revival attracts people for whom standing matters less, or who have enough of it elsewhere to spare. It does not attract people whose livelihood depends on the counts described under online status and identity.
Nor can the revival recover the record. The early forms produced archives because members kept copies; the revived forms mostly do not, because the culture of keeping copies did not survive the feed era. A small space that vanishes now vanishes as completely as a small space did then, and for the same reason.
Reading a claim about the revival
- Ask which trade the claim is about, and whether the writer has priced the right-hand column.
- Distrust any growth figure. The people reporting counts usually have a server to promote.
- Ask whether the writer has lived in both the small and the large form. Enthusiasm from someone who has only known one of them is a report on the other one's absence.
- Expect the cycle to continue. The revived forms will meet the problems of smallness, some will grow to solve them, and the grown ones will meet the problems of scale.
Common questions
Is the small web better?
It is better at the things in its left column and worse at the things in its right, and the people in it have chosen the left. Whether that is better depends on what you need.
Will federation replace the large services?
It will coexist with them, as the mailing list coexisted with the web. It recovers ownership and pays in convenience, and most people, most of the time, pay for convenience.
Why does this page give no numbers?
Because the revived forms are as hard to count as the originals were, and for the same reasons: a federated network has no single register of members. Any figure about these services should be dated and sourced before it is repeated.
