caveat emptor - a lot more capital is spent below the surface than is captured overall, and it is often demand upfront
just for reference, let's define the inevitably speculative app by the abstract utility: the user has personal access, they'll consume the feed for a combination of context & enjoyment, react passively in a monetizable fashion, then actively express their values to some outlet. imagine the user opens their phone, doomscrolls some m/n mixture of dancing/sketches vs compiled "ground news", engages in a bit of respective patronage & betting, and once stimulated enough, switches over to the immersive "teletherapy" (i.e. "waifu") tab to vent, optimize their future experience, and earn content through provenance/profiling. if we're talking about social apps, we're talking about behavioral preferences, & everyone in the arena is leveraging what they know about social science, then the natural convergence of incentives leads to a construct that tries to capture the full daily loop of human capital intrinsic to that DAU.
for a "pure" consumer social app, there's a 90/9/1 rule of lurking/shitposting/thoughtfulness, so one of the goals is finding the "90%" button (e.g. likes) that scales, adjusting the rules so the choice of pressing that button per a given context is risky & strategic (the "public likes" tab), then monetizing the network's ongoing response (e.g. ratios, bumps, etc). for a fully general-purpose, ambitious decentralized social project, you gotta leave a little dirt for the dirtman & fold the dirty art of praxis into the design.
the most promising form of praxis is recursive reassembly. there is an overwhelming precedent of figures like John D Rockefeller successfully commercializing the works of precursor inventors like James Young, Andrew Carnegie from Henry Bessemer, Edison from Davy, Westinghouse from Tesla. this recursive pattern works all the way forward, so we can take something like the Applevision Pro and trace its form, function, and rhetorical impact back through many layers to figures like William Shockley & Ed Roberts, and going forward again into a totally different subgenre like drone swarm hacking. this is a deep burden that decentralized social has to carry into the future, where the network has to be a "hypersynapse" of outcome-oriented intelligence, somehow distilling external phenomena, passive bystanders & their reactions from noise & slop, and all of this has to be so commercially-viable that it extends beyond the mainstream media cycle. just for further emphasis, what I'm saying is that many attempts will fade into the background (per usual) if they cannot seize the limelight for enough time. part of this is being lucky.
one thing to note: it's one thing to try and "be right" and tunnel-vision towards a higher purpose:
decentralized social networks are not just this. yes, indeed there will be clients that are cognitive + actualizing, the aesthetic being just that. these are the dingboards of the world, early platforms that bootstrap peer discovery & survive by a small intertwined group sharing actualization w/o switching contexts. but they're not scaling to self-sufficiency on vibes.
this is where actionable sociology plays out:
social networks are built on yappers. the "geeks" might have some loftier aspiration (or even delusion of grandeur, as some might claim), but they still need a solid duple of cognition & intuition to justify this, and believe or not, the yappers are equally equipped, just with a different North Star. why do people waste time queuing for a social club to pop bottles with paid models? why do tens or hundreds of millions tune into a mass media program? it's the universal value of yapping, all the way down.
the limitation of yappers, and to a lesser extent the same with "geeks": their sociology isn't grounded to the whole mesoscale, just the niche lifestyle. this isn't unreasonable, it's just a lossy, attention-efficient praxis. if a social founder takes Paul Graham seriously enough & bootstraps from the socioeconomically homogenous friends & family they already have, they're not going to be relatable as if they've dogfooded every user's perspective. often, we find ourselves exposed to really polarizing, misinformed yapping on traditional social networks because the substance is promoted arbitrarily with money or for ragebaiting. yes, this may be random, but it's pretty hard to avoid adspend & growth marketing altogether. ultimately, the most organic, sparse group of yappers will win by attrition if anything else, and it's cope to argue with this. (word of advice to apple-exclusive devs - your app may be whiteglove-smooth, but the audience is global with more sensitive consumer preference than you).
the ulterior point being that a promising, non-speculative decentralized social network still involves other forms of speculation. a founder might speculate on bootstrapping with ads, just as they observe their user speculating on spending extra time on a freemium version, or investing effort/capital for more toll-gated spaces (assuming the benefits pay off the upfront cost). this can be a critical blindspot for networks that bootstrap themselves, and the founders can erroneously ask or demand enough to regress platform activity. the juice has to be worth the squeeze, and if the money's not going directly to the user, the experiental reward needs to be frequent & consistent. Luis von Ahn really shows this with Duolingo's journey.
so, just to mention the paradox or tightrope again: the network does require some ulterior meaning & continue to dogfood transcendentally, but it needs to be this blissful or stimulating experience in actually practical form & function, especially the function of further yapping around the network. this isn't a trivial undertaking, and it has to be refined in production.
armchair commentary wouldn't really be armchair commentary without claiming "nothing's getting done", but quite to the contrary, I'm very ecstatic with what's already getting done, warts and all. there's the cabin.city "supper club" and Jon Hillis is even volunteering retrospective thoughts on popup cities. Farcaster LA folks are experimenting with long-distance walk & talks. this praxis is actually happening.
it still needs to go further. there's other building blocks lying around, like Allo Protocol as a meaningfully-staged contract for incremental work. Open Source Ecology is trying to opensource the construction stack. Farmbot opensources the rest of the proverbial farm. DePIN goes for the grid. Dangerous Things messes around with electronic implants. there's other biohacking spaces as well. humanoid robotics is getting cheaper. more sensory input & control is possible.
ideally, the experiments start compounding at this URL <-> IRL threshold. there's projects like icebreaker & ethOS. maybe we should experiment with stronger + cheaper proof of humanity by sideloading trusted setups into these lowkey gatherings. maybe we should figure out procedurally-generated loose consensus from these setups. maybe decentralized social hinges on a shared game that can scale at a distance, fully exposed to daily mundane life. maybe we're just missing the proper anonymous slop bucket, or the cheapest, expressive reactions. maybe we just need depots & dispatchers to formalize a decentralized gig economy w/ an induced social layer.
this is a very abstract, capricious subject, so I don't know if any of this is meant to work, or if it's meant to be well-capitalized enough to appear to work to distract the masses. all I know is the layers of experience on the social networks I've tried, and what soft tech needs right now is a meaningful multiplayer vs environment game. it needs guilds that know the plethora of specialists, and it needs unified agoras for those guilds to keep the lights on, and most importantly, it needs to work for yappers & without yappers in different, controllable instances.
just to wax philosophical for a moment, why be a tech bro speculating on a decentralized social future? because we know how tech actualized our past society, how individuals play into history & legacy, and our intuition (or belief) is that these experiments are tangibly demonstrating the possibility of "the hypersynapse" that actualizes those into the future who maintain & evolve our praxis. software might the eat the world, but we eat the software. so let's make it something that isn't upchucked gaud next to a yacht or the trading floor.