My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail because it&#x27;s a copy of something, but without the impetus that produced the original.It&#x27;s the &quot;make something people want,&quot; but more &quot;make something they use for X.&quot;<p>You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something that isn&#x27;t itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn&#x27;t a useful unifying principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it could not survive a truly hostile environment.<p>Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games. Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage people. Reddit was for sharing alternative&#x2F;emerging culture.<p>A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the current generation of censors came up in divergent&#x2F;alternative culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent opposition looks like than the old ones.<p>Short version is, we don&#x27;t need a decentralized social network, we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create that culture.