What’s next for social media?

Jay Springett, a tech strategist and podcast host, joined the social media app Butterflies AI out of curiosity, and ended up staying for greater than six months.

The thought of Butterflies is to permit human and AI personas to work together.

Mr Springett’s on-line persona developed over time, interacting with different synthetic characters, and even went so far as to start out its personal Beanie Infants [a line of soft toys] assortment.

He stated it was like AIs have been writing their very own cleaning soap operas inside a simulation.

“I did not have interaction with Butterflies in the identical approach I do with different platforms,” Mr Springett advised BBC.

“It felt extra like observing than taking part. I would not pay for it, however it was fascinating sufficient to maintain watching.”

A number of social media companies, like Butterflies, try to develop at a time when there’s dissatisfaction with the social media giants.

In keeping with information from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence firm, X’s each day energetic customers within the UK have dropped by practically 25% since January 2024.

And it is not simply X that has been struggling, cellular and desktop visitors to Fb has declined over the previous few years in accordance with Similarweb.

A report by the Pew Research Centre discovered {that a} third of teenagers use Fb and X, in contrast with three quarters a decade in the past.

Bluesky is among the social media companies gaining floor.

Over the previous 12 months, Bluesky has gained tens of tens of millions of latest customers, typically on the expense of X.

Other than simply timing, although, BlueSky’s success will be largely attributed to its novel structure, which pairs an X-like expertise with a excessive diploma of customization.

Not like centralized programs, the place social media firms have full management over content material and identities, Bluesky customers can select how their feeds are moderated, and how much posts the algorithm recommends to them, due to the lots of of choices supplied by each Bluesky and the group.

Do not just like the broader discourse on Bluesky? Leap on the “well-liked with pals” feed to see what the individuals you observe particularly are speaking about.

It is not going to be easy for Bluesky to scale as much as the dimensions of X and Fb, says Andy Tattersall, an data specialist on the College of Sheffield.

He methods it should strike a stability between “producing income, maintaining customers secure, and moderating content material, which is way simpler stated than finished”.

Movie star-backed basis, Free Our Feeds, hopes to try this.

It is backed some notable names, together with musician Brian Eno and actor Mark Ruffalo, and plans to lift $30m (£23m) over the subsequent three years to help an open social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, the decentralized community powering Bluesky.

“Bluesky has created a powerful basis for shared social media infrastructure,” says Robin Berjon, one among Free Our Feeds’ 9 custodians, “however as long as they’re the first operator of this infrastructure the danger stays that it’s going to cease working within the public curiosity”.

A much bigger fear for these rising platforms, although, is the community barrier. This may be summed up with Metcalfe’s Regulation, explains Evan Prodromou, co-author and present editor of ActivityPub, one other open social media structure, which is behind well-liked platforms like Meta’s Threads.

The legislation states that the worth of a community goes up with the sq. of the variety of customers. That implies that larger social networks have far more assets than smaller ones. They’ll use these assets to get larger and greater and crowd out smaller social media companies.

Non-profits like Free Our Feeds and the Social Net Basis, which Mr Prodromou heads, have a method that they hope will assist them overcome that Metcalfe’s Regulation.

They hope to exchange the present state of affairs, the place customers of social media hop between their favorite companies.

As a substitute Social Net Basis is growing a platform which might supply content material from all of them.

Threads for instance helps a protocol referred to as ActivityPub, which makes it simpler to mix companies with different social media companies that use that protocol – like Mastodon as an illustration.

Utilizing this type of interoperability, Mr Prodromou hopes that companies like Social Net Basis will present the identical worth as large, monolithic platforms.

It is not simple, as not all social media companies help the identical protocol, for instance, BlueSky makes use of the AT Protocol.

However there are workarounds to that drawback, and Free Our Feeds and Social Net Basis are additionally engaged on methods to mixture websites that use completely different tech.

“One factor we have learnt from the previous many years is that the very last thing the world wants is a one-size-fits all answer for eight billion individuals,” says Mr Berjon.

On the different finish of the spectrum are those who wish to carve a distinct segment out for themselves, reasonably than substitute the incumbents.

Within the final couple of years, a cottage trade of distinctive, new social apps has cropped.

A kind of is Mozi, created by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Mozi does not need you to socialize on-line in any respect.

As a substitute it informs you when you are going to be in the identical place (metropolis or occasion) as somebody and encourages you to attach with individuals extra typically in individual.

“Till Mozi, no mixture of apps may inform me what metropolis my pals are in at any given time, and even what my pals domestically are as much as,” says Mozi co-founder, Molly DeWolf Swenson.

Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard, is satisfied such innovation will lead to a brand new period of social networking, the place quite a few new, extra fascinating sorts of social networks will emerge and supply individuals extra decisions.

He hopes that Flipboard’s app, Surf will assist individuals handle a messy social media ecosystem. It permits customers to browse from a centralized feed that may draw posts and content material from a wide range of platforms, together with Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube.

“Ultimately,” says Mr McCue, “it is unlikely one service will substitute the Fb or Twitter we as soon as knew, however as an alternative a number of companies will begin to take our time away from these old-style single feed experiences, our behaviours will shift with these new decisions and new generations will count on extra.”