History repeats itself, but not during consecutive events and not always.<p>I think natural way social networking would go forward is that there will be a lack of interest in general purpose social networking. These will be eventually replaced by cliques kind of things that are context specific. Basically, social structure would be integrated in most products, inherently. Now that might (or might not) require a centralized social graph.<p>But saying that RSS&#x2F;Atom would replace proprietary general purpose networking gives an impression that there would still be interest in a Newsfeed going forward. It also assumes that we are at pinnacle of social networking evolution and all that needs to happen is even distribution of power. I think both statements are false. This is exactly the kind of thinking that drives FOSS products 10 years behind time.<p>The Web is not a distributed AOL. A distributed AOL would have failed. AOL <i>evolved</i> into Web. There are plenty of examples of distributed protocols being evolved into proprietary one. In fact, look at the usage numbers surging on messaging apps. Compare that to rate of e-mail and SMS.