A tech trade veteran, Mike McCue sees a gap for a special form of web the place algorithms don’t name the pictures. Mr. McCue, the chief government of the web firm Flipboard, is difficult social media’s automated grip on our consideration, betting that people, not machines, ought to curate on-line experiences.
Three a long time in the past, as vice chairman of know-how on the groundbreaking tech company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize data entry by means of the World Huge Net. Now, he’s positioning his firm’s new Surf browser as a part of a rising group of so-called decentralized social media choices, alongside rising platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.
The timing could possibly be fortuitous, as on-line publishers wrestle with an outdated downside and a brand new menace. For years, they’ve nervous that the web’s middlemen — big platforms like Fb and TikTok — have weakened their ties with the individuals who learn or view their materials. Now publishers face one other situation: New A.I. techniques that might utterly remove these fraying hyperlinks with their audiences.
Surf affords a window right into a quiet know-how motion echoing the early days of the World Huge Net. With the help of a number of web technical requirements which can be supposed to encourage the expansion of a brand new form of social media, Mr. McCue has created a possible path the place media firms can construct direct relationships with readers.
In distinction to the present social net, which is dominated by a number of giant know-how firms, the brand new software program protocols could appear a bit wonky for now. However they make it attainable for web customers to speak and share data with out counting on a single centralized service.
One of many new technical requirements is named ActivityPub. Social media platforms utilizing the protocol can discuss to 1 one other, permitting customers on totally different networks to work together seamlessly — much like how e mail works throughout totally different suppliers.
ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Huge Net Consortium, a know-how standards-making group. The usual initially drew scant curiosity. However Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now generally known as X, in 2022 has created an exodus of customers and publishers searching for alternate options.
Surf permits cellphone, pill and private pc customers to curate feeds from quite a lot of sources right into a single dashboard-like view. It should additionally enable them to publish personally curated collections of data.
Surf continues to be being privately examined by Mr. McCue’s small firm, which plans to supply this system freely later this yr. But whereas the open social motion continues to be small, it has gained consideration each time there’s a disruptive occasion reminiscent of Mr. Musk’s buy of Twitter.
Decentralized social media gained vital momentum in 2023 when Meta adopted the ActivityPub normal for its X competitor, Threads, and later introduced plans to attach with different ActivityPub-based companies. What Mr. McCue calls the “open social net” already has greater than 300 million contributors, he estimated, and the majority of them are actually Meta’s Threads customers.
The shared objective of main customers out of silos accelerated with the current success of Bluesky, which the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched in 2023. Though it’s constructed on a rival normal generally known as the AT Protocol, a bridge has already been constructed between the 2 protocols to make it attainable for customers of the social media companies to attach.
“Everybody has simply been copying one another’s options in walled gardens, however now innovation will develop into decentralized round human connection,” Mr. McCue mentioned in an interview.
Mr. McCue, 56, co-founded Flipboard as a digital information aggregator in 2010. He has made a profession of being early to use modifications in web applied sciences. He began Paper Software program to make it attainable to visually show 3-D data in net browsers after which offered the corporate to Netscape for $20 million in 1996.
In 1999 he co-founded Tellme Networks, a pioneering effort to create what had been described as a “voice browser” and make it attainable to obtain web data through the cellphone. That firm was offered to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.
One of the vital potentials of the open social net is that it’s going to allow firms to step away from invasive promoting, Mr. McCue mentioned. He describes the choice as “contextual” promoting to specific pursuits moderately than people. For instance, adverts may be posted to net feeds centered on subjects reminiscent of backpacking or trend.
“The notion of making an viewers moderately than chasing site visitors is one thing we now have been exploring,” mentioned Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a well-liked information and media web site. “ActivityPub may facilitate that by permitting for extra direct and significant engagement with our readers.”
Along with Meta’s determination to base Threads on ActivityPub, information organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the know-how, as have running a blog platforms reminiscent of Medium, WordPress and Ghost.
ActivityPub has additionally led to a wave of start-up efforts reminiscent of Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has greater than 14 million accounts related by a community of over 14,000 host computer systems, in addition to start-ups like Pixelfed and PeerTube, distributed companies that provide options much like Instagram and YouTube.
For a number of a long time, Google’s dominance of web search has been the driving power behind content material creation and distribution. However as Google has invested in generative-A.I. summarization for responses to customers’ queries, a window of alternative for all types of discovery instruments along with chatbots has made the necessity for alternate options extra pressing.
That may be a far cry from the very early roots of the World Huge Net within the work of Theodor M. Nelson, who, whereas a Harvard graduate scholar in 1961, observed that textual content on the primary pc screens may transfer and that writing now not wanted to be linear. He invented the idea of hypertext, which was later adopted because the underlying construction of the World Huge Net. The designers of the brand new open social net companies consider that their various is a step again towards the web’s authentic beliefs.
“It goes again to the unique rules the place the web began out as decentralized,” mentioned Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social networking platform that permits customers to hitch independently operated servers whereas staying related by means of a worldwide community.
The transition from centralized to decentralized fashions would require a cultural shift amongst each publishers and audiences.
“There are vital product questions to unravel, reminiscent of the right way to deal with moderation and content material discovery in a decentralized setting,” mentioned Mike Godwin, a lawyer identified for his work on web rights and digital tradition. “However these are the varieties of recent issues we ought to be going through, ones that include real innovation.”
Regardless of these challenges, the passion among the many early adopters reminds some web pioneers of the primary few years of the World Huge Net.
“The vitality round ActivityPub jogs my memory of the early days of the Net,” Mr. Nelson mentioned in a current interview, “the place something appeared attainable, and innovation was round each nook.”
