Social Capital

I accidentally found a 19 year old article from The Guardian today titled "Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?" by Victor Keegan. (thanks @kagi.com for showing it when I searched "myspace" earlier today)

Victor Keegan: Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?

In retrospect, MySpace did lose its monopoly a few years after this was written, February 2007. MySpace was my first social media, and 07 was also roughly the first year I had access to the internet as a 13 year old living in a rural area. So for me it was a bit fun to read the thoughts of the time as an adult, and see some echoes of current problems still in being social on the internet. Things like "users don't get paid" for "User-generated content", and what caught my eye.

Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.

Social capital. That stuck with me; I haven't stopped thinking about that. I think that's the perfect way to explain what you are building on social media. But what is your social capital? It's capital that both you and I have produced. It's our likes, it's our posts, it's the friends we made, the jokes we laughed at online, it's our social life on the internet. We shouldn't have to leave behind the fruits of our social interactions because it is time to move onto a new platform.

Moving your social capital is one of the major things the atprotocol is solving. You should be able to pack your suitcase and move to a new site. It even describes the next problem. Where do you go once you've packed?

It is common knowledge that a fax machine is worthless until others have one too. That is what is happening in social networking except that, unlike a fax machine, it can't be instantly swapped for another. It is easy to change search engines, even if it is Google. But if you change social networks you not only have to move all your videos, audios, messages, photos elsewhere but you also lose your network of friends unless they migrate with you.

Well, there are other "fax machines" now that you can swap out. Atprotocol lets you pack and take those connections with you. It's still early in the grand scheme of things, but you can already see this with Blacksky. Blacksky has been the atproto community's vanguard and leader in manufacturing an alternative fax machine for their community. You can move your social capital to their server at move.blacksky.community. You can login on blacksky.community and view posts that are served from their server, even those posted with Bluesky. You can even make private posts now to the connections you made on Bluesky if you are a part of the Blacksky community. This really takes the dream of packing up your social capital and going to a new home, and sprinkles in new functionality that builds on top of what you've already built.

There are other manufacturers tooling up to produce fax machines or with test units out, Eurosky.social, northsky.social, and others are some great examples. They are hosting places where you can transfer your social capital. Creating alternative ways to view your social capital with things like mu.social, and both with goals to give their communities brand new fax machines they run so you can talk to other people on the atmosphere from an alternative view of it that is not ran by Bluesky PBC.

Almost 2 decades from when this article was written, not everyone will probably know what a Fax Machine is. But they still have social capital, and the dream of being able to move between platforms is here. With the atprotocol you can take what you built with you when you go, and the ones you made it with.