What is changing in early social networks

The forms of the early networked web keep coming back. Small groups on invitation. Feeds in the order things were posted. Servers run by one person for people they know. Independent sites linked by hand. Each revival is announced as new and each is a return, and the interesting question is not whether the old forms are better but what each one costs, and who is prepared to pay it now who was not before.

This page treats the revivals as a set of trades. It states no adoption figures, because there are none worth stating, and names no service, because the forms outlast the services that carry them.

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

The large services solved the problems the early forms had, being hard to find and hard to reach, and in solving them created problems the early forms did not have. Ranked feeds decide what is seen. Moderation at scale is impossible to do well and expensive to do at all. Standing accumulates and cannot be exported, so leaving is costly, so degradation is tolerated. The arguments set out under critiques of social media are, read one way, a list of the reasons someone might go back.

So a revival is not nostalgia, or not only. It is a decision that the problems of scale are worse than the problems of smallness, made by people who have experienced both. The first time round, nobody had experienced scale, and the move toward it looked like pure gain.

The trades

Revived form	What it recovers	What it pays
Small, invitation-only groups	Norms taught by example; conversation among people who recognize each other	Reach; the group cannot grow past the point where example fails, and it knows it
Chronological feeds	Seeing what your connections posted, in order, with no system deciding for you	Discovery; nothing surfaces that you did not already choose to follow
Federated servers	A community that owns its container and can move it, with a path to other communities	Convenience; someone has to run the server, pay for it, and moderate it, and that someone is a volunteer
Independent personal sites	Total control of presentation and no landlord	Audience; a site nobody links to is a site nobody finds, and the linking has to be done by hand
Long-form threaded discussion	A record; slow conversation that can continue for years	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, and the revival is made of those people, which means it is self-selected and small, and will stay small unless the trades change.

Federation: a new form with an old shape

The one genuinely new element is federation: separate servers, run by different people, that can exchange messages by a shared protocol so that a member of one can follow a member of another. The fediverse is the general term for the networks built this way. The shape is the old mailing list and the old 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, which the internet communities page treats as the difference between renting a room and having one. It pays for that property in exactly the way the early forms did: someone has to run the machine, and that person is not paid, and the moderation across servers is negotiated between volunteers with different norms. The problems it has are old problems, and the early record, thin as it is, describes them.

The size question, again

Small groups work because small groups can hold norms without writing them down. There is a rough ceiling on the number of people one person can hold as individuals, and Dunbar's number is the usual name for it, whatever its exact value; the point is that communities under it behave differently from communities over it, and the early web mostly lived under it because it could not grow.

The revival deliberately stays under it. That is the trade in its purest form: a community that refuses growth in order to remain a community. It cannot deliver the benefits that depend on reach, and its members mostly know this and have chosen accordingly. 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, and a person who moves to a small space leaves their audience behind. The revival therefore attracts people for whom standing matters less, or who have enough of it elsewhere to spare, and it does not attract the people whose livelihood depends on the counts described under online status and identity. That shapes its population in a way the first early web was not shaped, because in the first one nobody had standing to lose.

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 revived forms are hard to count for the same reasons the originals were, and 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 figure here would be a guess with a decimal point.