A Sociable Web

The process of building out this site has inevitably involved design choices about how to engage with various technologies and other people's web presences. It's a truism that you can't solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it's most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people's websites that's not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I'll call a "sociable web".

Sociable Web not Social Network

I'm using the term "sociable web" as a conscious contrast to "social network". Social networks have unavoidably shaped our understanding of what form of socialization is possible online, and I don't even think it's always been for the worse. But now they are fragmenting and rotting, and whatever was good about them—their casual usability, the massive network effect of "all your friends are here"—is falling away like so much decayed flesh. I want to envision something new, and when doing so I often find that a new name can help.

"Web" versus "Network"

I'm not interested in a "network" in the sense either of a single company overseeing many users or a decentralized collection of nodes like the Fediverse that is nevertheless tightly coupled technologically. I don't think either of these forms are sustainable in a capitalist world. They are either fed by boundless venture capital coffers which inevitably move to capitalize their userbase, or they're built on the backs of massive amounts of unpaid labor and poorly-understood power structures. The exploitative conditions under which these networks are produced run downstream and affect their social dynamics.

I'm interested in a social form that uses as its foundation the web itself. Where anyone can participate just by having a website. Where the existing networks are, to some degree, part of that form already simply by virtue of being accessible over HTTPS.

"Sociable" versus "Social"

"Social" is unopinionated. "Social" is throwing a bunch of people into a room and seeing what happens. A party can be social, but so can a witch hunt. "Social" is thinking about the technology as primary and allowing the social dynamics to fall out from that. When things are built to be merely "social", they force the real humans who use them into chaotic interactions both healthy and harmful, a freeze peach nightmare that only a libertarian could love.

I want more than that. I want things to be sociable, to be friendly, to be fun. I don't mean to try to avoid conflict entirely, which is neither possible nor truly desirable. But to envision a sociable web is to envision a place where interactions that make your world richer are easy to realize, and those that make your life worse easy to curtail. I want to be able to chat in public without the world overhearing, to meet new people and be able to block creeps, and to have conversations without being drowned in a sea of bad faith.

Social Pillars

The first step towards understanding what a sociable web could be is to understand the social goals we're trying to achieve. Social media, for all its doomed flaws, is a huge part of millions of people's lives for a reason, and it's not just because it exploitatively monopolizes its users' attention. It meets real needs people have for connection and communication in a space that's decoupled^[1] from physical proximity. If we can identify the healthy interactions and cut them away from the rotten habitat that is (for now) their only home, we can start building a web that is genuinely for us.

Conversation 💬

This is the core of what it means to socialize: saying things, having people hear them, and listening to responses. If you're not saying anything, you're just a lurker—not a bad thing to be, but also not a participant in a social dynamic. If no one hears you, you're just writing a diary. And if no one responds, then you might as well be. Conversation is the fundamental building block of human interaction. Without conversation, you have nothing. Silence. Void.

Conversation, like the libertarian "social", is unopinionated. It can be vapid or it can be enlightening; it can be uplifting or it can be miserable. But this flexibility is also an asset: when conversation can be both silly and serious, comic and tragic, it gives people room to bring their whole selves (or whatever slices or performances of themselves that they want) into the space. This is one reason I make a point of posting jokes on this blog, even when they're incredibly dumb.

Conversations are also (at least in physical reality) local. Even when conversing in a public space or a crowded party, most of the time you're just talking with a small number of people. People may drop in and out, but there's no expectation that everyone in the room will hear everything you say.

...and Technology

I see conversation as one of the key failures of the old-school "blogosphere". You could post all you wanted, but the means of actually turning those posts into a conversation was extremely limited. Comment sections met this need to a degree, but without the ability to make a long-form response to a long-form post and have the original author actually see it a culture of back-and-forth never blossomed.

The classic blog form also felt, for better or for worse, like it had to be long-form and serious—another failure of conversation. I think part of this was just a problem of snowballing cultural precedent, part of it was a failure of performance (which I'll get into below), and part of it was a vicious cycle with the inability to reply in kind. Small posts are compelling to write because they function as an invitation to casually interact with the author. Once that interaction is curtailed, there's far less reason to write small posts; if you write fewer small posts, you'll build up less of a network of people who will interact casually.

Tumblr, to its credit, did solve both of these problems. Its original stated goal was to be a blogging platform that encouraged smaller posts, but it also supported reposts^[2]—and in doing so, ended up metamorphosing from its blog-oriented origins into an out-and-out social media site. I think this is the critical distinction, in fact, between the era of blogs and the era of social media. Blogs are built around a one-way flow of writing, where social media is built around conversation. So how can we bring conversation back to individual websites, which are tied to the blog form at least inasmuch as they aren't part of a tightly-coupled network?

It won't surprise those of you who read my post on h-entry that I think reposting is a key part of the answer. Having a way to interact with people that keeps the context of the conversation intact and encourages other people to participate is extremely valuable. But equally valuable is making sure that the conversation is visible to the existing participants. If I can only see replies from people I'm already following, conversation is stifled. I think Webmentions are the best solution for this that currently exists, and I'm planning a more thorough non-technical introduction to them for a future post.

Performance 🎭

Although talking with people is the most important way of being sociable, I think there's another modality that's subtler but still very relevant: performing for people. I mean "performance" in a very broad sense, covering anything that's fundamentally about creating something for others to appreciate. This can be a long, well-reasoned essay or a silly offhand joke; it can be visual art, a poem, or a css crime. I call it "performance" because my heart is in the theater, and because a critical aspect is not just the creation itself but the two-way dynamic between the creator and the audience.

To be able to see the joy or catharsis or edification your creation brings to people in real time is tremendously heady. At its best, it allows the creator to see their work through new eyes and appreciate it all the more. It can be inspirational, motivational, and even open up whole new avenues of creation—for example, I would have never started helping Zandra with Her Majesty the Prince if she hadn't treated it as a performance she was writing live, chapter by chapter.

The potency of performance can be turned to harm, though. The desire for applause can wrap itself around your heart until everything starts to feel like a performance. Performances can be a great joy and a source of profound connection, and having room for them is crucial. But they cannot be the bread and butter of social interaction. Any healthy social situation must have plenty of room for simple conversations with no thought of an audience beyond the participants.

...and Technology

Performance is the handle by which social media grabs hold of your attention and refuses ever to let go. Performance is the food it feeds you as you scroll your infinite timeline, and the heart of the Skinner box it uses to keep you posting forever. This is harmful. Cohost absolutely made the right call in dramatically minimizing this effect by removing metrics such as like counts for posts and follower counts for people.

But like many vital nutrients, while an overwhelming focus on performance is toxic, you need some to thrive. And this is something that individual web sites struggle with^[3]. You can implement anonymous "likes" like Medium's claps or BearBlog's up arrow, but without names and faces this feels hollow and impersonal. And attaching an identity while still making "liking" a post simple and quick all but requires some sort of centralized account^[4].

I think comments are a critical part of the solution here. Even a simple "hell yeah" or "love this!" comment feels personal, and there are plenty of comment systems that make posting without an account relatively painless. And "making a comment" feels enough weightier than "liking a post" that a small signup flow reads as less egregious, even if the end purpose is the same.

Reposts are even more valuable as a form of "applause". Not only do they bring a post to a new audience, but they're the strongest possible endorsement. Nothing makes me feel more like my writing is appreciated than seeing it show up in a friend's link roundup, and I think the roundups people like Dante, Shel, Nicky, Caoimhe, and many more have been doing are among the most valuable contributions to building a sustainable culture for a sociable web.

And I do think culture is the deciding factor for nourishing performance without letting it become toxic. For sure, there are technological aspects as well: Webmentions are crucial for allowing an author to actually see reposts, h-entry makes it far easier to create a repost and adds a lot of expressive power to Webmentions, and the generally slower pace of web-based posting limits the potential for performance to become toxic. But none of that matters if we don't establish a culture where we tell people when we appreciate their posts and share them if we think our friends will appreciate them as well.

Meeting People 👋

Hanging out with your friends is lovely, but friends don't come from nowhere. Everyone wonderful in your life (other than blood relatives) was once a stranger to you, and there was a moment when you first met them. In order for a social context to fully function, to be more than just a group chat, there must be a way to build new relationships with people you don't already know—to have that moment of meeting and to give it room to grow.

There are two parts to this that are equally important. First, you have to have a way to actually literally see new people in your daily social experiences. If you're only ever interacting with the same group of friends, you'll never meet anyone new. There needs to be some amount of circulation: being introduced to friends-of-friends, going to a party, joining a hobby group for something you're interested in. What are the analogues for these the digital world?

But merely interacting with new people isn't enough. Building an actual relationship with someone requires a capacity for balance. There must be a way to break the parasocial asymmetry of merely "following" someone and to instead put yourselves on equal terms. That's not to say that you have to do this with everyone, or that it has to be explicit—it's rarely explicit in person. But if there are structural barriers from moving from "acquaintance" or "fan" to "friend", then all you'll ever be or have is groupies.

...and Technology

I have met the substantial majority of my friends, including many people I consider "in-person friends", either directly through social media or transitively through other friends whom I met through social media. My life would be immeasurably different if I'd never created a Twitter account, and most of that difference would be the connections I would have never established with people who are now beloved friends. But despite all that, I don't think social media is actually very successful at making it possible to meet people.

There were specific historical contexts in which it worked well, to be sure. The little slice of queer Twitter I was part of in the mid-10s, after the most vicious of the cancel wars but before the algorithmic timeline got really bad, was one of those contexts. I'm sure over the years and across the communities there were many more. These were never perfect—I have come to strongly believe that knowing for sure when someone unfollows you or doesn't follow back is intrinsically corrosive to real friendship—but they did function.

But those contexts were always contingent, small loopholes that were doomed to close. The structure of social media, the arc upon which it bends, pulls towards a world where parasocial relationships are everything, because parasocial relationships are profitable^[5]. The parasocial structure already mirrors the distribution of content for profit, and so is far easier to Midas-touch into the gold standard of the internet era: advertising. X dot com is no longer the hot new kid on the block; it has far fewer users than TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, all of which are fundamentally about sharing media rather than communicating. The only outlier is Facebook, which itself has fan pages and a deeply pernicious algorithm.

This is one place where I think the classic blog structure fares a little better in one key respect: it's very easy to have a balanced relationship with someone. You "follow" someone via RSS or just checking their blog periodically, and this leaves no trace other than the comments or other conversations you explicitly choose to have. It can be parasocial—or at least it could back in the day when there existed very popular blogs with huge followings—but if a blogger appreciates a particular set of comments or reposts they can easily follow the creator's blog, post a few comments of their own, and gracefully unfollow if it doesn't click.

The crucial problem for blogs is the circulation. You need to be able to actually see other people in order to meet them. Friends' reposts and link roundups (which are functionally the same thing) can help you find new blogs to follow, although there's currently not a great equivalent of "hobby groups"^[6]. Comments can help you actually connect with new people you've found, although this really only works if they connect back to the commenter's own web presence, which many out-of-the-box comment solutions frustratingly don't support. I'm sure forbidding homepage links mitigates spam to some degree, but I think it's actively detrimental to establishing new connections, and I encourage everyone to search out comment apps that have a place to fill in the commenter's website (as am I at the moment—there's a lot not to like about CommentBox but this tops the list for me).

Having people repost and respond to your posts is also an excellent way to get a sense of them, because you're seeing them in their native habitat, as it were: on their own blog, writing primarily for their audience. But this does require actually being notified when those reposts happen, which requires the use of a technology like Webmentions on both ends of the interaction.

Avoiding People 🫤

The final pillar is I think the most difficult all around: in a healthy social space it must be possible not just to have healthy interactions, but to avoid unhealthy ones. This is, interestingly, something that's not even entirely solved in person—I imagine that the delicate dance of navigating which of your feuding friends to invite to which parties is a tale as old as the concept of a party itself. But in person you can at least always walk away when someone you can't stand walks up, and if someone is being belligerent enough you can toss them out on their ear.

A healthy social space has to be resilient to both small-scale interpersonal conflict and large-scale bad actors to avoid collapsing under the weight of humans being inevitably human. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that a perfect solution here isn't possible—someone with a big enough grudge and enough VPNs can harass you through the most robust defense, and it'll never be possible to just edit someone out of your life or community no matter how much they piss you off.

...and Technology

Just like in person, I don't know that any digital platform has come up with a really robust solution here. The state of the art, I suppose, is mutes ("I can't see you") and blocks ("...and you can't see me either") for smaller conflicts and thoughtful human moderation along with suspensions, bans, and IP bans for bigger problems. Unfortunately, all of that depends intrinsically on having a centralized platform.

Even the Fediverse, for all its Twitter mimicry, struggles with this issue. Mutes work fine, blocks mostly work but only on the assumption that other instances play by the rules. Bans only sort of half work—in email terms, you can ban someone from making an account on your server or emailing anyone on your server, and you can ask politely that no one forward anything from your server to them. All of these cross-server conventions are enforced by the extremely coarse-grained threat of defederation, which itself relies on intermediate servers that are not defederated to play nicely. To a degree, it all comes down to little fiefdoms screaming at each other.

And that's still worlds more than you can do on an independent site. Most comment services provide the means of blocking someone from commenting on your blog, but unless it's self-hosted that's the limit. Anything more than that (like making sure they can't cause problems for other people) is up to the comment software's moderation staff, if they have any. If you run your own server and know the IP of someone who's a problem, you can probably IP-ban them, but there's no other way to block them from looking at your site (and even an IP ban is easy to circumvent). There is some intrinsic protection just by virtue of how relatively low-bandwidth the communication channels on individual websites are—it's a lot harder for someone to dogpile you when sending you a message isn't just two taps away for all their followers—but that only goes so far. I don't know if there's a great solution here, especially given that no public presence will ever be truly safe from dedicated harassment.

Smaller-scale avoidance is somewhat easier. RSS readers could in principle filter out reposts from people you don't want to see—the only one I know for sure has this feature is Inoreader (and then only with a paid account), but it's not hard to envision. If all my dreams come true and blogs do truly have a wide resurgence, maybe this will become a valuable differentiating feature. And again, the fact that blogs are much less of a firehose than social media means that it's that much easier to periodically just wince and scroll past a repost of someone you dislike.

Can we do it?

Is a sociable web even something that's possible to create? In 2024, it's easy to despair at computers in general or the internet in particular being usable for anything good at all, and yet here you are reading my words, hoping to make some sort of connection with me or with my ideas. I believe in the power of those connections. It may be true that no corner of the world is safe from the corrosive power of capitalism, but so too is no corner of the world impervious to human flourishing.

I think we can do it. In fact, I think we will—but whether that starts now or years from now depends on us. What precisely a sociable web will look like, I'm not sure. That's why here I've chosen to focus on the social goals first and make the technology secondary. But I do believe that enough technology exists today to at least take a stab at it, and I want you to join me in that.

The deepest virtue of independent websites communicating with loosely-coupled conventions and protocols isn't anything technical. It's the fact that you can just do it. You don't need a platform to exist, you don't even need anyone else to be doing the same thing (although it's more fun that way). You can write a blog and people can read it via RSS or just by loading it up every now and then^[7]. You can hook up as much IndieWeb technology as you want^[8], or just focus on the cultural aspect by writing link roundups and leaving comments on the stuff you read.

The crucial part is that you participate, and help to shape the web you want to exist in. Don't just let the dictates of some megaplatform constrain the way you connect with people. You have the power to make the web a place for people.