At the end of last year, the Verge made a 2024-outlook with a big post on the future of social media, which was basically a pitch for the Fediverse. And it’s focus had been on: money. The narrative went something like the following: before the WWW, there was AOL, which decline eventually lead to a huge boost of innovation (and of course money), and now, the same thing is happening again. It’s a perfectly reasonable story, however, except for Meta’s big promises (and some smaller companies more or less successful endeavours), not much has happened on this front, yet.
Why? Because this time, it’s different.
Why is it that businesses aren’t yet flocking to the Fediverse? Why is it that except for some nerdy blogs and techie websites, its still basically invisible in the public debate?
Well, because there isn’t much money in it, yet and probably, this won’t change much in the near future. Think of it like this: how would you make money out of a newly created Fediverse server? Well, first of all you would need to get people on it. Either by building trust or by having some great features. Then, you would either start charging money for it, show ads or sell the data of your users. However, changes are high that people will then leave your server for a different one, where they get everything for free. Additionally, it’s not like in web1, where you visit a website to buy dog food and afterwards never visit it again; in social networks, you want to spend some time there. Getting people to join your network is hard enough, keeping them there and charging money for that even more.
And while some of them may accept a basic form of payment (let it be their data, their attention or an actual fee), monetization for providers will be much harder than in a walled garden, because basically there will always be someone who does the same but for a cheaper prize. When in the old world, the user was themselves a good, necessarily owned by the service to which they were inseparably bound to, they are now free to choose and are thereby their own means of production: their own social capital, which they can move around at will.
This means that actually, businesses will have a hard job getting money out of the whole thing.
The thing that does however lie in the Fediverse is the potential for social capital. Actually, huge amounts of that. The Fediverse will enable people to connect on the web itself to a degree that was unseen before.
However, companies aren’t necessarily great at generating social capital, and that only, if they can squeeze profit out of it effectively, which isn’t that easy in the open system that the Fediverse is.
This can be seen more as a good or more as a bad thing; however, it will probably shape the further development of the Fediverse and should probably be kept in mind: the Fediverse will probably not be overrun by businesses any time soon. So, collectives will have time to form on the Fediverse. However, it also means that they will have to do it. They have to move into the window of opportunity, before it is closed again by companies like Meta, who will eventually again turn everything into a walled garden once they have to increase their profit.
The Open Science Network could be exactly the thing needed here for three reasons:
- It shows the huge potential of social capital in the Fediverse and gives it a concrete practical use case. It makes immediately sense to people and is something that one can show to people how the Fediverse actually works and why it’s important, apart from decentrality and that it isn’t owned by Elon Musk.
- It combines social capital with a common resource everybody wants to have access to and that becomes more valuable, the more people are connected to it: knowledge.
- Twitter and other services and concepts of the web became big exactly through this: with the help of the science community. First came the nerds, then the scientists, then the gamers and Harry Potter fans, then the normies.
The Open Science Network could be the “IT”-project, the Fediverse has so long waited for. It’s a positive project, people understand it immediately, and it’s also a cool project for the open-source community to contribute to.
However, if that’s the case, it would most likely result in a significant power shift within the Fediverse. Up until now there are three big players in the Fediverse and its environment: Threads, BlueSky and the Fediverse itself. For simplicity, we will look at them here as more or less different collectives. The most obvious observation is that they are fierce rivals of one another, as for example the bridge between Fedi and BlueSky showed, the hostility by some parts of the Mastodon community towards Threads, or the deafening silence between Threads and BlueSky.
However, the entering of an open science collective could create a new situation: since knowledge gets more valuable the more people are connected to it, a common resource is created, which creates a completely new situation. Instead of fighting over social capital of different users, they would suddenly try to get the favours of the open science collective.
This would put the open science collective in a very comfortable position and force the other collectives at least to not pull the plug on federating with the others, at least not permanently. In any case, it would give the development of and the project of the Fediverse as a whole, a big boost most likely.
At the same time, it should be kept in mind that making something like the open science collective happen in the first place will most likely not be done by companies (because they don’t even want to), but by the open-source and science community themselves.
When the creation of the WWW let people create their own town squares, markets and fairs on the internet, now, the Fediverse let’s them create their own towns and universities around it. But because not many people are there yet, the landscape is huge and there is much of free-of-charge-places, it’s hard to charge money for something.
Nilay Patel: “The fediverse might happen. I think it’s exciting. Do you think that all of this space is going to create new sunlight reaching ground and new things will happen? […]
From Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future
Hank Green: “I do. What I worry about is that there’s not a ton of random money sitting around.”
Fungiverse Tales 