Why the open social web matters now
13 comments
·October 14, 2025johnnyanmac
Maybe this was more of an intro/pitch to something I already support, so I wasn't quite the audience here.
But I feel that talking about the open social web without addressing the reasons current ones aren't popular/get blocked doesn't lead to much progress. Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include:
- moderation
- spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl
- good faith verification
- posting transparency
These are all hard problems and it seems to make me believe the future of a proper community lies more in charging a small premium. Even charging one dollar for life takes out 99% of spam and gives a cost to bad faith actors should they be banned and need another dollar to re-enter. Thus, easing moderation needs. But charging money for anything online these days can cause a lot of friction.
BrenBarn
Those are important reasons, but there are other reasons as well, such as concentration of market power in a few companies, which allows those companies to erect barriers to entry and shape law in ways that benefit themselves, as well as simply creating network effects that make it hard for new social-web projects to establish a foothold.
numpy-thagoras
"- moderation
- spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl
- good faith verification
- posting transparency"
And we have to think about how to hit these targets while:
- respecting individual sovereignty
- respecting privacy
- meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason
and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use.
It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
echelon
It'd be cool if you had to pay a certain amount of money to publish any message.
And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion.
I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention.
I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.
Groxx
it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
echelon
Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
prisenco
Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable.
I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
krapp
>I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
"Startup engineer" believes the solution to decentralization is a startup, what a shock. We look forward to your launch.
prisenco
I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.
If I were to build something like this, I'd use a wikipedia style non-profit model.
Ad-supported services result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.
JuniperMesos
> What specific pain point are you solving that keeps people on WhatsApp despite the surveillance risk, or on X despite the white supremacy?
Why wouldn't a genuinely open social web allow people to communicate content that Ben Werdmuller thinks constitutes white supremacy, just as one can on X? Ideas and opinions that Ben Werdmuller (and people with similar activist politics to him) think constitute white supremacy are very popular among huge segments of the English-speaking public, and if it's even possible for some moderator with politics like Werdmuller to prevent these messages from being promulgated (as was the case at Twitter until Musk bought it in 2022 and fired all the Trust and Safety people with politics similar to Werdmuller's), then it is not meaningfully open. If this is not possible, then would people with Werdmuller's politics still want to use an open social web, rather than a closed social web that lets moderators attempt to suppress content they deem white supremacist?
> As I was writing this talk, an entire apartment building in Chicago was raided. Adults were separated into trucks based on race, regardless of their citizenship status. Children were zip tied to each other.
> And we are at the foothills of this. Every week, it ratchets up. Every week, there’s something new. Every week, there’s a new restrictive social media policy or a news outlet disappears, removing our ability to accurately learn about what’s happening around us.
The reaction to the raid of that apartment building in Chicago on many social media platforms was the specific meme-phrase "this is what I voted for", and indeed Donald Trump openly ran on doing this, and won the US presidential election. What prevents someone from using open social media tech to call for going harder on deportations, or to spread news stories about violent crimes and fraud committed by immigrants? If anything can prevent this, how can the platform be said to be actually open?
marshfram
Social media relies on our dead. arbitrary signaling system, language, which once it's accelerated becomes a cybernetic/cog-sci control network, no matter how it's operated. Language is about control, status and bias before it's an attempt to communicate information. It's doomed as an external system in arbitrary symbols.
I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it.
I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.