Maybe Bluesky has "won"

I remember Quora circa 2016 fondly. It had a high number of interesting people writing deep insights into their area of expertise. And then, of course, since they are a venture-backed startup, they tried to grow, and it all went sideways.

I think a small, somewhat homogeneous community is very attractive. You get a high ratio of interesting posts and very little toxic behavior.

The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. Technology won't solve this problem (because it is not a technology problem). Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Maybe the balkanization of social media is the best we can hope for.

I think the fundamental issue is running a social network as a for-profit business. Every business model people have tried so far has ruined the platform for the people who originally found it valuable.

Online services do scale, which is the root of the problem. It's more profitable to focus on a large number users who get a little value from the platform than on those who find it particularly valuable. No matter whether your revenue comes from ads or subscription fees, you want more users, more impressions, and more activity. Which turns your focus away from whatever the early adopters did when there was only a little activity.

Influencers are a convenient red flag. Once they find a platform attractive, it's probably no longer good for activities not centered around them.

We don't actually want online communities to get too big, from a users' perspective. After a certain size, they become difficult to maintain any sense of responsibility to the established culture, become targets for coordinated manipulation or misuse and end up requiring constant moderation just to be usable.

But taking venture capital means you can never restrict growth, even if in the end it kills your service.

I'd love to see a Reddit that caps its communities to a thousands or even hundreds. Once that cap is hit, either form a new community or join a waiting list. But it's clear that a hundred passionate users often produces a much better discussion than millions.

> The problem is those communities never scale. Maybe they can't scale. ... Moderation also won't solve the problem (IMHO) because it's either too expensive at scale, or it just imposes the homogeneous viewpoint of a subset of the community.

Every problem you mentioned is solved by Mastodon. Independent instances can and should stay relatively small to allow good and independent moderation, while the whole network can grow a lot without being homogeneous.

Maybe you're right--we'll see.

How big do you think a Mastodon instance can get before it's too big? Right now the largest instance is maybe 1 million users. Let's say that's a good size. To get 3 billion people on it (Facebook's scale) we'd need 3,000 different instances, right?

Except, people won't evenly distribute. Instead, we'll have a power law distribution. The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200 million, and so on. That means that most Mastodon users will be in Twitter-sized instances, and you'll either have to spend a ton of money on moderation (except, I don't know who pays) or you'll end up with the usual toxic anarchy.

> The largest instance will be maybe 500 million users, the next largest will be 200

Yes, this is likely indeed. Those instances will probably be unsustainable and/or user-hostile, but users are always free to leave to another instance without much to loose.