What's it going to look like?
Lots of ignorant predictions
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Twitter's problems following its sale, have exposed a philosophical debate among the intellectual leaders of the Internet. The divide is between those who believe that "everyone should have a website" and those who feel that the Internet is a medium for making money.
Nowhere is this dichotomy clearer than in the fallout over Twitter and the rush to Mastodon:
Mastodon's CEO, Eugen Rochko, says the platform has over one million users, with 489,003 new users signing up since October 27 — the day that Musk closed his $44 billion deal buy Twitter.
Mastodon is a free, open source software platform that enables users to send "toots" to other members of Mastodon in a similar way to "tweets" on Twitter. Total membership numbers are misleading: Mastodon has a little over a million users while Twitter has nearly 400 times as many.
The differences between Twitter and Mastodon demonstrates the philosophical issues.
Twitter is a company, Mastodon is software. No one can create content on Twitter without a Twitter account, which allows Twitter to make money be selling advertising to companies that want to sell something to a particular audience.
Mastodon is software that anyone can install and exchange information with others. There is no central control of Mastodon, so they have no client information to sell.
Organizations are creating Mastodon sites. There's one for archeologists (why else the Mastodon name?), the European Union has one (so they can be anti-American big business) and people upset with content rules on Twitter have several. Content can be sent from one user to another, even if they are on another Mastodon site, so it operates much like Twitter -- except that the content rules on Mastodon sites aren't consistent from one site to another.
Mastodon is, in the words of the philosophical argument, "distributed." No one controls the overall functionality of the whole.
This philosophical debate is playing out in the metaverse, behind the scenes. Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Alphabet (Google) and others are working on a model of the metaverse where users would have one login and be able to go from one site to another while others are hoping to create their own "walled garden" where only "their" users are welcome.
In the beginning of the Internet in 1990, everything was distributed (so called "Web1"). Along about 2000 people started to realize that they could make money from the Internet -- and they could make more money if they could figure out a way to trap everyone into using their platform exclusively (Web 2).
With blockchain, non-fungible tokens and some vision of the metaverse, the distributed advocates started painting visions of Web3 featuring distributed content and structure.
All of this hinges on how the next big thing plays out on the Internet. We have done about all we can do with cell phones. Each new release event gets a bigger yawn than last year's introduction. Whether the metaverse (or something out of left field) becomes the next big thing, it's time for a reinvention of the Internet. Companies are spending massive amounts of money to develop it, whatever "it" is.
It could be that the platform makers (currently those making cell phones) will be the big winners, but I expect that entrenched Internet players will figure out a way to make oodles of money out of whatever experience we are presented with. Distributed networks will probably exist about like Mastodon does today. The ratio of users won't be too different, either.
For investors, don't get excited by the early attempts at a new paradigm. The early personal computers are long forgotten, likewise the early cell phones. Pay attention to the kids. Enthusiasm from tech professionals is meaningless.
When young users start adopting something in numbers, invest small amounts. Buy more if it migrates to young professionals. This can be hard for older people to get their heads around, but early adopters are almost always kids. They aren't as tied to old ways and like to try new things. Tech professionals tend to get charged up over new technology. Kids buy what's fun and new. Fun trumps new every time.
The kids point the way.
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