It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.
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It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.