The next bubble that will pop: Big Social Media

Right now, it’s still private companies controlling most of social media, for example X, Reddit or Facebook.

But the days of those will soon be counted, as soon as a decentrally governed social media platform comes along, which combines all of them with your identity.

Simple data import from one of the legacy platforms, and then you continue having exactly the same functionality, but supercharged and, most importantly, not ad-driven, because the network itself is funded via donations or via selling enterprise support etc.

People will then happily switch; the main issue is just that, still nowadays, most peer-to-peer applications haven’t caught up with regular social media feature-wise.

I know that the people do want something like Facebook. A platform which is genuinely easily accessible and which allows posting onto your “wall” and, most importantly, publishing events, but also 1-on-1 and group messaging. Where you don’t need to select the “server” you have your data on (like with Bluesky), because it’s all peer-to-peer anyway. End-to-end encrypted by default of course.

This project will be the drop-in replacement for Facebook. Or Reddit, there the groups are just subreddits. Or X, where posts are just tweets. Or Instagram, where posts are also just part of the timeline. Or TikTok. It’ll all be a single social network, but with different pathways (i.e. different user interfaces) of accessing it, each strongly inspired and sometimes closely replicating one of the contemporary giants in the social media world. This way, the exact same content could be accessed in whatever form is most comfortable for the user, thus making transitioning from one of the mainstream social networks much more comfortable and hassle-free.

Of course, when this happens and actually works well, this will drain the mainstream social media companies of their members and, eventually, their revenue, because they become less and less attractive for advertisers. If I can get the exact same service like Facebook, but without ads, completely for free? Of course, let’s go. And additional privacy, because your data isn’t used anymore for advertisers to spy on you.

This is truly supposed to be humanity’s last social network. Where we don’t reinvent the wheel and start from scratch, but where, during account creation, we import the data from all other social media accounts of the user; posts, settings, private messages, everything. All unified into one coherent structure, no matter whether it’s Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit or virtually anything else, we can liberate your data from all of them.

That is, don’t invest into social media stocks or short them. As soon as a properly user-friendly standard emerges, where there will be exactly one app replacing each of the mainstream social media apps and you can import your existing data into it flawlessly, and you can say which accounts you want to merge (even if they come from different platforms), they will crash hard.