Before the outbreak of this wave of AI started by large models, the topic that the Internet circle is most concerned about is undoubtedly what the next generation of the Internet should look like. Metaverse and Web 3 were the two major concepts pursued by the industry at that time. It's a pity that the metaverse, which is too ambitious, fell first, and now it is also the turn of Web 3, which is holding high the banner of decentralization.
A few days ago, Mozilla, which operates the Firefox browser, released an official blog saying that it will stop operating the decentralized social platform Mozilla.social on December 17, 2024. In fact, Mozilla.social is one of a series of decentralized social products born to attract users of the X platform last year when a large number of users fled under Musk's "blind command".
At that time, in order to reshape Twitter into an "X" that suits his heart, Musk first relaxed the control of negative content represented by hate speech, then limited the number of tweets that users can view, and canceled the classic "Blue Bird" logo, which eventually led to topics such as "Goodbye Twitter" that resonated with many users. Seeing Musk self-destruct the Great Wall, Instagram, TikTok, and Mozilla.social are all eyeing this large number of lost former Twitter users.
Since most of the users who left X were dissatisfied with Musk's "nonsense", Mozilla.social put on the banner of "decentralized social network" to avoid the unbridled behavior of the operator. Unfortunately, according to relevant reports, Mozilla.social currently has only 270 active users, just like Sony had to suspend the first-party masterpiece "Star Attack", because the user base is too small, Mozilla.social has also lost the value of continuing to operate.
Decentralized social networking is actually a concept that has been widely discussed as early as 2015. From the initial ICQ to the rise of Soul in the mobile Internet era, in the past 20 years, whether it is acquaintance socialization, stranger socialization, or around geography and interests, a constant core is that social products are always centralized, and the product tonality also follows the baton rotation of the operator, which is completely different from community products such as Tieba, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili.
Today's social networks basically present a pyramid rather than a network structure. Among them, the Internet manufacturers as the spire control the overall situation, the tower body is occupied by KOLs and Internet celebrities as nodes, and the tower base is occupied by ordinary users. Nowadays, the average user is basically in a state of aphasia in social networks, and centralized social networks also bring a general disregard for user privacy, and create impossible tasks such as moderating the content of billions of users.
Proponents of decentralized social media want to build a social product where everyone has a voice, everyone deserves attention, and everyone is at the center, allowing users to control their own content and even allow users to create quantifiable value through social interaction and knowledge sharing. So the question is, why did Mozilla.social fail in the end?
In fact, even Mastodon.social, the most successful decentralized social network, has only 250,000 monthly active users, while mainstream platforms such as X and Facebook now have hundreds of millions of monthly active users. One of the core problems of the failure of decentralized social networks is that with the current level of technology and the education level of users, decentralization is likely to be a false proposition.
At present, the vast majority of Internet products holding high the banner of decentralization actually have the same characteristics, that is, the technology is decentralized, and the actual operation and decision-making are still centralized. The most typical example is Pavel · Durov, the founder of Telegram who was arrested in France not long ago, although Telegram itself is a decentralized instant messenger, but the founder is not decentralized.
Even in the field of cryptocurrency, in addition to the rare example of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, on the one hand, is promoting decentralized governance, but the Ethereum Foundation led by him has become the center of the Ethereum ecology by relying on the controller of the hard fork.
The reality is that the Internet giants that have grown up on the Web 2 model have used scale and branding to control the Internet world, while big data and cloud computing have led to front-end diversification and back-end centralization. Facebook, google, baidu, qq and other URLs have become one of the most powerful companies on the planet.
Another reason why decentralized social networking can't work is that users, as the basic unit, are both consumers and suppliers. Consumers themselves demand value from the platform, and the value of the demander also depends on the platform to actively explore, such as the current Internet manufacturers' conventional drainage and then secondary transformation. However, most of the current ordinary users do not have the consciousness of being a provider.
How to make everyone create value on the platform and consume it at the same time is an almost impossible task for developers of decentralized social products. With the Internet already so ubiquitous, it would be a pipe dream to expect all netizens to be universally aware of the exploitation of themselves by Internet giants and to try to change the status quo.
As a result, it is difficult for fans of decentralized social products to convince more people to participate. After all, why should you abandon the existing social chains of Facebook and WeChat and accompany you to new platforms such as Mozilla.social to "pioneer", and decentralized social products cannot directly use the existing relationship chains of centralized social products.
In the current situation that Web 3 is still in the air, decentralized social is destined to be small and beautiful, and it is good to support Mastodon.social, where is there a place for Mozilla.social?