Notes from our DWebCamp session imagining the future of open social networking

At this year’s, DWebCamp, my friend and collaborator Kaliya aka IdentityWoman and I ran a session titled:

“Envisioning the future: what if a single, decentralized, interoperable, open social network indeed emerges and wins over the proprietary platforms?”

We did something that, at least for me, was new. We started with:

• Assume it has happened. We have won. Like on page 1 of a sci-fi story, you wake up in the morning one day and the world you want is has suddenly arrived.
• At least 4 billion people interact with each other socially on an open, decentralized social network. All of the proprietary platforms have much smaller user numbers or have disappeared entirely; they have stopped mattering.
• Out of scope: how we get there, or which specific products/standards/technologies are being used.

We asked the question: “Describe what you see”. People who came to our session had a few minutes to meditate on that question, and then wrote down their thoughts, one at a time, on some stickies. They then announced what they wrote and put it on a big sheet of paper. Below is the electronic version of this paper (minus some items which I could not manage to decipher when transcribing):

What surprised me most is that there were so many comments that wanted to have a single “social universe” into which various apps and screens and voice are “windows”", rather than a single app. That’s very close to the original vision for the world-wide-web, and one that we’ve largely lost with all the apps we are using every day. But perhaps we can get it back?

Addition 2024-08-17: two more, which I don’t know how to transcribe.