I have no more patience for platforms. I'm done.
Products come and go. This is a truism of the internet. Do not expect any particular service to exist forever, or you will be burned. It can be a depressing thought. So much of our lives are lived online. Communities and culture are created online. The play is performed on stages we call "social media". But then they go away.
We make our homes on these platforms. Set up shop. Scale a business. Connect with our friends. Build a following. Then something changes. A change in corporate strategy. An IPO. A private equity takeover. A merger with AOL. And it's never the same after that. All that work, all that culture, now painted in a different light. Sometimes locked away entirely.
We can keep doing this cycle again and again. Invest our time and our lives into a platform. Thrive on it. Watch it die and simply move on to the next thing. It sucks though! Why should I have to leave Twitter if I spent a whole decade cultivating my presence there? Just because some Nazi asshole accidentally bought the thing?
Communication tools are like art. When you put art out into the world, the relationship people form with the work is not yours. It belongs to them. The piece takes on a life of its own. The communities people create with a communication tool are theirs. Platforms are rarely good stewards of people's lives, their relationships. And so we feel loss every time the cycle repeats.
Every time we pour our words into someone else's platform, we are creating social debt. Similar to technical debt, this does not incur a cost in the now. The pain is realized later, when the reality that you don't control this space becomes real.
I write to you now on a new kind of place on the internet. This place is mine. Or rather, what I create here is mine. This product (a rather fine one by @btrs.co if I say so myself), belongs to @offprint.app . They might go away. Someday they will. But this, my words, my creation. The human act of creating culture. This is mine. It lives in my personal folder. I keep my personal folder at @selfhosted.social . They will go away someday too, and that's okay. I'll move my folder somewhere else. You'll still be able to read this. Offprint is just an app for reading a certain kind of post I publish to the ATmosphere. When Offprint inevitably dies, hopefully a long time from now, this post will still just be a file in my personal folder. And when that day comes, perhaps even before, there will be other ways to read this file from my personal folder. You can even do so right now.
So, yeah. I'm done with platforms. I feel no obligation to invest my energy into a product just for it to be gobbled up and thrown away in a few years, or used to fund activities I personally find repulsive. Not when I have a choice. I choose the open social web. I choose protocols over platforms. I choose protocols, only insofar as they support people. Because again, people create community. Community creates culture. And I choose people over protocols.
People > Protocols > Platforms
I'm a designer. I love a well made product. Between a capable app and a nicer to use but slightly less capable app, I am want to choose the prettier one. But when it comes to my people, my community, I will not pour my life into someone else's platform. Not when so much life has been wasted on platforms which only seek to extract. Not when there is an alternative on the social web. And there are more alternatives every day. Because the social web runs on protocols, there are no gatekeepers. Nobody can say, "hey don't build that!". We can just do things. You want to make a little web game? Worried nobody will play it because you might just stop paying the server bills? No problem! Plug your game into @atproto.com . Let me keep my gameplay data in my folder. Your game may go away, but I'll always have my scores. Have a weird idea for a speculative social VR experience? Put that on the social web and I WILL TRY IT. I have nothing to lose. I won't lose anything, even if you lose everything.
People are going to keep building platforms. It's what we've done for 20 years. Someday though, people will have few reasons left to build one. Why would anyone invest in your closed, black box, centralized product, when we have something better already. Why would you build from scratch, when millions of people have already formed social graphs, established communities, created culture, on the open web? Anyone can build on that. The tide lifts all boats. The open social web is going to win. Come join me and be a part of it.
If this resonated with you at all, here are some folks to check out.