Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/can-indie-social-media-save-us
What Jamie wrote
Nice writeup by Cal Newport about IndieWeb solutions. I like that he highlights my own microblogging platform of choice, micro.blog! He's skeptical they can have the scale of the surveillance networks out there today.
Despite its advantages, however, I suspect that the IndieWeb will not succeed in replacing existing social-media platforms at their current scale. For one thing, the IndieWeb lacks the carefully engineered addictiveness that helped fuel the rise of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This addictiveness has kept people returning to their devices even when they know there are better uses for their time; remove the addiction, and you might lose the users.
I totally agree, but I also don't think the goal is to be that scale. These services are human scale, and that is part of what makes them great.
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