What’s next for social media?

Jay Springett, a tech strategist and podcast host, joined the social media app Butterflies AI out of curiosity, and ended up staying for more than six months.

The idea of Butterflies is to allow human and AI personas to interact.

Mr Springett’s online persona developed over time, interacting with other artificial characters, and even went as far as to start its own Beanie Babies [a line of soft toys] collection.

He said it was like AIs were writing their own soap operas inside a simulation.

“I didn’t engage with Butterflies in the same way I do with other platforms,” Mr Springett told BBC.

“It felt more like observing than participating. I wouldn’t pay for it, but it was interesting enough to keep watching.”

A host of social media services, like Butterflies, are trying to expand at a time when there is dissatisfaction with the social media giants.

According to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, X’s daily active users in the UK have dropped by nearly 25% since January 2024.

And it’s not just X that has been suffering, mobile and desktop traffic to Facebook has declined over the last few years according to Similarweb.

A report by the Pew Research Centre found that a third of teens use Facebook and X, compared with three quarters a decade ago.

Bluesky is one of the social media firms gaining ground.

Over the past year, Bluesky has gained tens of millions of new users, often at the expense of X.

Apart from just timing, though, BlueSky’s success can be largely attributed to its novel architecture, which pairs an X-like experience with a high degree of customization.

Unlike centralized systems, where social media companies have complete control over content and identities, Bluesky users can choose how their feeds are moderated, and what kind of posts the algorithm recommends to them, thanks to the hundreds of options offered by both Bluesky and the community.

Don’t like the broader discourse on Bluesky? Jump on the “popular with friends” feed to see what the people you follow specifically are talking about.

It will not be simple for Bluesky to scale up to the size of X and Facebook, says Andy Tattersall, an information specialist at the University of Sheffield.

He ways it will have to strike a balance between “generating revenue, keeping users safe, and moderating content, which is much easier said than done”.

Celebrity-backed foundation, Free Our Feeds, hopes to do that.

It’s backed some notable names, including musician Brian Eno and actor Mark Ruffalo, and plans to raise $30m (£23m) over the next three years to support an open social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, the decentralized network powering Bluesky.

“Bluesky has created a strong foundation for shared social media infrastructure,” says Robin Berjonone, one of Free Our Feeds’ nine custodians, “but so long as they are the primary operator of this infrastructure the risk remains that it will stop operating in the public interest”.

A bigger worry for these emerging platforms, though, is the network barrier. This can be summed up with Metcalfe’s Law, explains Evan Prodromou, co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, another open social media architecture, which is behind popular platforms like Meta’s Threads.

The law states that the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of users. That means that bigger social networks have way more resources than smaller ones. They can use those resources to get bigger and bigger and crowd out smaller social media services.

Non-profits like Free Our Feeds and the Social Web Foundation, which Mr Prodromou heads, have a strategy that they hope will help them overcome that Metcalfe’s Law.

They hope to replace the current situation, where users of social media hop between their favourite services.

Instead Social Web Foundation is developing a platform which can offer content from all of them.

Threads for example supports a protocol called ActivityPub, which makes it easier to combine services with other social media firms that use that protocol – like Mastodon for instance.

Using this kind of interoperability, Mr Prodromou hopes that services like Social Web Foundation will provide the same value as giant, monolithic platforms.

It’s not straightforward, as not all social media firms support the same protocol, for example, BlueSky uses the AT Protocol.

But there are workarounds to that problem, and Free Our Feeds and Social Web Foundation are also working on ways to aggregate sites that use different tech.

“One thing we’ve learnt from the past decades is that the last thing the world needs is a one-size-fits all solution for eight billion people,” says Robin Berjon, one of Free Our Feeds’ custodians.

At the other end of the spectrum are those that want to carve a niche out for themselves, rather than replace the incumbents.

In the last couple of years, a cottage industry of unique, new social apps has cropped.

One of those is Mozi, created by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Mozi doesn’t want you to socialise online at all.

Instead it informs you when you’re going to be in the same place (city or event) as someone you know and encourages you to connect with people more often in person.

“Until Mozi, no combination of apps could tell me what city my friends are in at any given time, or even what my friends locally are up to,” says Mozi co-founder, Molly DeWolf Swenson.

Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard, is convinced such innovation will result in a new era of social networking, where numerous new, more interesting types of social networks will emerge and offer people more choices.

He hopes that Flipboard’s app, Surf will help people manage a messy social media ecosystem. It allows users to browse from a centralized feed that can draw posts and content from a variety of platforms, including Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube.

“In the end,” says Mr McCue, “it’s unlikely one service will replace the Facebook or Twitter we once knew, but instead several services will start to take our time away from these old-style single feed experiences, our behaviours will shift with these new choices and new generations will expect more.”