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My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions
https://www.timothychambers.net/2024/12/24/predictions-for-the-open-social.html https://www.timothychambers.net/2024/12/24/predictions-for-t...
- amannm 10mo agoplease put more work into AI generated content
- nunobrito 10mo agoThe article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR: 1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution 2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ https://iris.to/ as first example 3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
- evbogue 10mo agoWhat strategy will Nostr use to achieve true P2P social?
- nunobrito 10mo agoFrom what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections. I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.
- iamnothere 10mo agoThis is great to hear. The part about Bluetooth/radio/LoRa sounds vaguely like Reticulum. I’ve always thought that the two projects could find alignment somewhere. Nostr with Reticulum style features, or even just Nostr over Reticulum, would be unstoppable.
- nunobrito 10mo agoSorry to say, my opinion is that such alignment will NOT be happening on the foreseeable future unless AI can be used to program whatever is missing on reticulum. Reticulum is poorly implemented on the library side and assumes everything to be encrypted, which is heavy on network links with poor bandwidth. Plus, on radio waves the encryption is not even permitted. NOSTR can be simplified to be less verbose and function on less bandwidth links like bluetooth, LoRa and be unencrypted (just signed messages) to legally use radio waves. Reticulum has some kind of drama against using bluetooth for transmission of data. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to change in the near times.
- cxplay 10mo agoThe sheer breadth of Nostr's current development is overwhelming at times. I often find myself exclaiming, "What? Nostr can be used like that?" At present, Nostr appears to be merely a protocol operating within a social media framework. Its capabilities are vast, yet it fundamentally only requires "sending JSON via WebSocket and signing it using the specified algorithm."
- baggy_trough 10mo ago> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features. That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
- j45 10mo agoSteady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers.
- chrneu 10mo agoAs far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service. i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere. i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky. bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
- AJ007 10mo agoMastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.
- observationist 10mo agoIt's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there.
- jimmydoe 10mo agosocial network, and to some degree open internet, is a millennial thing, it will die out as millennials get older.
- fogzen 10mo agoI tend to agree — but is there any data on this?
- culi 10mo agoA poll of gen alpha (aged 12-15) from 2024 asked about job aspirations: YouTuber (32%) TikTok creator (21%) Doctor/nurse (20%) Mobile app/video game developer (19%) Entrepreneur (17%) Artist (16%) Sports athlete (15%) Professional online streamer (15%) Musician (14%) Teacher (14%)
- senorrib 10mo agoI’d argue those aren’t really because of the social aspects of Youtube or TikTok.
- flipbrad 10mo agoSomething so grim should be accompanied by its citation, just so we can check it's not a windup
- xnorswap 10mo agotwo decades ago it would have been: 1. Movie Star / Actor 2. TV Star / entertainer Youtube / tiktok are just the equivalent for that age in this day & age.
- culi 10mo agoThis is probably true and I would be really interested to see a longer-running study with a consistent methodology taking this on
- antonkar 10mo agoX or Bsky will likely evolve/become replaced by the social network where every tweet is an instant poll, here's a mockup I found: https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20 https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20
- abhinavb05 10mo ago[flagged]
- mnls 10mo agoBluesky? Fediverse? Really?
- KellyCriterion 10mo agoDoes anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her? I loved her compilations.
- bookofjoe 10mo agohttps://www.mindset.ai/blogs/in-the-loop-ep19-mary-meeker-ai-trends-report-highlights#:~:text=After%20a%20six%2Dyear%20hiatus,the%20oracle%20of%20tech%20trends. https://www.mindset.ai/blogs/in-the-loop-ep19-mary-meeker-ai...
- KellyCriterion 10mo agothank you
- bookofjoe 10mo agoYou are most welcome.
- riffic 10mo agocan't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen.
- tolerance 10mo agoNorman Cantani?
- DustinBrett 10mo agoI still have yet to see a BlueSky link in the wild.
- Kye 10mo agoCheck any sports subreddit. I also see them on Discord all the time. https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/ https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
- andrewinardeer 10mo agoProbably because of the pile on a few months ago about "no X links in my subreddit" because Musk is allegedly a Nazi.
- Kye 10mo agoNope. It's been like this for much longer.
- mjr00 10mo agoNo, the poster you're replying to is 100% correct; after the Elon "nazi salute" incident, many/most of the sports subreddits banned links to X. Given the nature of sports subreddits, which are frequently just links to breaking news from journalists on social media, Bluesky is used as a mirror for X posts which are allowed to be linked in those subreddits. e.g. just pulling from the front page of your link, [0] and [1] are the same post. The Twitter one is the primary source (posted 25 minutes earlier, 10x the engagement). [0] https://x.com/TomPelissero/status/2003827902388093289 https://x.com/TomPelissero/status/2003827902388093289 [1] https://bsky.app/profile/tompelissero.bsky.social/post/3maqhov5k3s2q https://bsky.app/profile/tompelissero.bsky.social/post/3maqh...
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- Kye 10mo ago>> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack — PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure — will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company." Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.
- brw 10mo agoBlacksky's AppView did get a mention in his 2025 predictions review[1], but perhaps it's not exactly considered "self-sustainable" yet? I haven't kept up with it in a while either so I'm also not sure on whether it is or isn't. [1] https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-web-prediction.html https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-we... (at the very bottom)
- jollymonATX 10mo agoIt's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)
- conception 10mo agoHow does bluesky have no shareable content? My friends who twittered now all use BS. Haven’t noticed a change in “check this out”
- jollymonATX 10mo agoPoint to publically posted bs links or embeds please then. Not F2F shares. That's what I am talking about. X and FB have those in droves and they are a real growth driver.
- Lord-Jobo 10mo agoNot embeds or links, but tons of skeet screenshots on Reddit, daily. ubiquitous. Not remotely as common as xeets, but the platform is way less common so that checks out. And the overwhelming majority of Xitter content that breaks out of platform are just screenshots as well and not direct links/embeds.
- heavyset_go 10mo agoHasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though. IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
- rcarmo 10mo agoMy anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. I’d say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isn’t happening.
- saltysalt 10mo agoI predict 2026 will see a mass return to self-hosted blogging (and the Linux desktop, natch).
- jollymonATX 10mo agoThis is my hope as well, but fear of ai scrape is real among folks I have chatted with this about.
- incompatible 10mo agoFear of AI scrape? I'm just amused at the idea of my words ending up manipulating chatbots to rewrite stuff that I've written, force-feeding it in some distorted form to people silly enough to listen.
- api 10mo agoIf you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? How’s that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites? If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
- justinator 10mo agoThis is not an answer to your question, but one issue is that if you write about some niche sort of thing (as you do, on a self-hosted blog) that no one else is really writing about, the LLM will take it as a sole source on the topic and serve up its take almost word for word. That's clearly plagiarism, but it's also interesting to me as there's really no way the user who's querying their fav. ai chatbot if the answer has truthiness. I can see a few ways this could be abused.
- falcor84 10mo agoI don't see how this is different from the classic citogenesis process; no AI needed. If a novel claim is of sufficient interest, then someone will end up actually doing proper research and debunking of it, probably having fun and getting some internet fame.
- sMarsIntruder 10mo agoAs others here below have noticed, there is no match between actual data and predictions made by the authors. Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why?
- krapp 10mo agoBecause people tend to predict the future they wish would happen, not what the data says would be most likely. The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread.
- lifeisstillgood 10mo agoSocial media compromises - asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter” Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on. You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life. I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
- pfraze 10mo agoI think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications. Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
- mosura 10mo agoSlightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances. That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
- anentropic 10mo agoWhat would be driving that trend? I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services. I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work. The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
- tcdent 10mo agoSocial movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off. When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales. People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance. (w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
- brw 10mo agoOn that note there's also https://tangled.org https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers). With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoI really like this atproto model so much. Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone. You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything. People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs. That said, I did try to get some of my git repos on https://Tangled.org https://Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app https://bookhive.buzz https://bookhive.buzz or the annotation service https://seams.so https://seams.so , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need. Tangled was a surprising contrast, but I hope to be online there sometime soon-ish!
- tolerance 10mo agoI suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that it’s presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the ‘Open Social Web’. You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content. Maybe I’m seeing things the wrong way.
- jasonvorhe 10mo ago> You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content. I think this is working pretty great on nostr. You have the WoT to fight cheap spam, spammers/scammers/impersonators get quickly reported and when they show up for you, you'll see who of your followers reported them for which reason. I can still see if I want to check myself. I'm in control, but I don't get bombarded with unfiltered spam. So far nostr has handled spam waves remarkably well. Problematic material (CP, etc) is scrubbed off of most relays/blossoms quickly. Whenever I stumble upon opinions I heavily disagree with, I'm glad that nostr exists. I wasted way too much time in the self censorship safe space hellhole that is Mastodon where too many instance operators think themselves god of their own little pocket universe. If that's you're looking for, more power to you. It just wasn't for me.
- Animats 10mo agoSomething that the social media industry will try hard to stop: users placing an AI agent between themselves and their social media accounts. Smarter clients that front-end a large number of social media services may be the answer to the hassles of federation. If somebody works this right, Facebook/X/Instagram could be Left Behind. The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
- fragmede 10mo agoBeeper already does this where possible.
- anhner 10mo ago"the social media industry will try hard to stop" lmao. I think you've misspelled "will actively encourage"
- ben_w 10mo agoWhen it is their own AI, encourage; anyone else's, prevent. How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
- cicko 10mo agoWhich language is this written in?
- 1317 10mo agoEnglish?
- yanoleaf 10mo agosocial web? naw, most normies are just hypnotized on the GPTs now