This reminds me of something I had posted in the "commonplace book" on my website recently:
We used to have social media in the 1990s. It was called AOL, and there's a reason hardly anybody misses it.
I keep thinking that the reason we got stuck with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. was that the techies responsible suffered from the following flaws:
1. They had no sense of history, and either didn't remember or chose to ignore the examples of platforms like AOL.
2. They got it into their heads that human relationships, identities, and interactions are something that can be reduced to third normal form, stored in a database, and recreated with a join query.
Ordinary internet users got sold a bill of goods. This isn't how we should have brought the world online. We should have gone all-in on decentralization. A home server capable of serving small websites for a household, handling their email, providing secure IM, etc. is perfectly possible, but nobody seems to want to build and sell one aside from the FreedomBox people. Furthermore, Congress should have forced the telecoms to rollout IPV6, provide static IPV6 addresses to households, and allow people to run their own servers out of their own homes as a non-negotiable condition for Federal broadband subsidies.
But instead of empowering individuals to control their own online presence and create their own platforms, we conned them by luring them into a crappy global chatroom where everybody gets their noses rubbed in everybody else's shit.
IMO, social media crossed the Ripley Threshold years ago. Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.
the "commonplace book" on my website
I'm familiar with the idea of a commonplace book in general, but I'm curious how you've implemented a web-based one.
Interesting thoughts on decentralization. That would have made for a smarter public, and probably participation on lower numbers. Both would be good.
The Ripley Threshold- I love it! Never heard that classic phrase named that way before.