Social networks (communities and networks of friends) are significantly different to social media (global broadcast), although they may overlap in fuzzy ways.

1/6

I realize that peer-to-peer such as SSB can neatly support the use case social networks, but I think it's totally unsuitable for implementing peer-to-peer social media. So far I have no idea how to do peer-to-peer social media. That's something @bluesky is aiming to find. 2/6

I have a hard time believing blockchain could neatly support social media use cases. Where would you store all those likes and retweets? Someone else's computer obviously. So incentives and tokens are needed. Would all users *really* pay a tiny fee for every like? 3/6

Maybe federation could work, but Mastodon instances (by the way, it's amazing and successful) so far has put users into silos, often instances block connections with others, etc, so it's not quite ready for global broadcast. 4/6

The best I can think as an alternative to centralized social media is the Web, like how blogs are essentially not different from big media sites. But that's just "media on the web", not "social media". Social media is *participatory*, anyone can comment, retweet, like, etc. 5/6

Here's my conclusion: if social media can't be made peer-to-peer, maybe we should just drop the concept and stick with the Web for global broadcast use cases? For the "participatory aspect", just link to each other's blogs and sites. 6/6