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 concept 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 begin its personal Beanie Infants [a line of soft toys] assortment.

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

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

“It felt extra like observing than taking part. I would not pay for it, but it surely was attention-grabbing sufficient to maintain watching.”

A number of social media providers, like Butterflies, are attempting to broaden at a time when there may be dissatisfaction with the social media giants.

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

And it isn’t simply X that has been struggling, cellular and desktop visitors to Fb has declined over the previous few years in line 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 likely one of the social media corporations gaining floor.

Over the previous yr, Bluesky has gained tens of tens of millions of recent customers, usually on the expense of X.

Aside from simply timing, although, BlueSky’s success could 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 corporations 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 a whole bunch of choices supplied by each Bluesky and the neighborhood.

Do not just like the broader discourse on Bluesky? Bounce on the “in style with associates” feed to see what the individuals you observe particularly are speaking about.

It won’t be easy for Bluesky to scale as much as the dimensions of X and Fb, says Andy Tattersall, an info specialist on the College of Sheffield.

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

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

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

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

An even 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 in style platforms like Meta’s Threads.

The regulation 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 sources than smaller ones. They will use these sources to get larger and greater and crowd out smaller social media providers.

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

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

As an alternative Social Internet Basis is creating a platform which may supply content material from all of them.

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

Utilizing this sort of interoperability, Mr Prodromou hopes that providers like Social Internet Basis will present the identical worth as big, monolithic platforms.

It is not easy, as not all social media corporations assist 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 Internet Basis are additionally engaged on methods to combination 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 Robin Berjon, one in every of Free Our Feeds’ custodians.

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

Within the final couple of years, a cottage business 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 an alternative 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 usually in particular person.

“Till Mozi, no mixture of apps might inform me what metropolis my associates are in at any given time, and even what my associates regionally 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 attention-grabbing varieties 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.

“In the long run,” 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 providers 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.”