As G+ goes away, it has made me look at what the social media landscape will look like in the not so distant future.
It is rather clear to me that FB will soon be the past, it might remain as ubiquitous as e-mail but just as e-mail it will be something we suffer through not a place we just visit for fun. Google likely saw the writing on the wall and, instead of migrating its aging platform into the future, decided to avoid all of the growing pains that the mere idea of social media is undergoing at the moment. But I am late to the party, some had already seen this coming back in 2012.
As platforms become larger their influence in society grows with them, the need for censorship, editorializing, and just plain policing grows with them. The deleterious effect FB had on the last US presidential election (and many other events and movements around the world), are the new normal. Governments around the world have noticed, regulation will soon follow. Even FaceBook knows that as it has now explicitly asked the government for regulation. The social and ethical dilemmas are too big for one company to handle on its own.
When human societies (of any form) grow, the need for government and regulations increases with it, social norms are not only part of what it means to be human, these really apply to any social animal across all of the evolutionary spectrum. You don't even need language, much less the internet, to see this in action. What really made humans stand out above all other species are the tools that allowed us to collaborate at very large scales. Perhaps only termites can compare. Moral norms, cities, countries, and government are the words we use to describe the necessary elements that arise from this need for organization. In the internet world these become conduct codes, communities, sites, and moderators. Politics is the process that makes that structure work, it applies to human societies of all sizes. From the family to the world.
The first group to vocally react to the pain of the need to conform to societal norms in social media was the Far Right. Under the guise of "Freedom of Speech" a whole market was created and social media platforms started catering to them. Gab was the most notable but more Libertarian sites such as MeWe jumped at the market opportunity. Gab soon realized that conforming to social norms was also needed just to be able to be part of the normal internet, and saw its servers being removed from polite society multiple times. But this is a market, and when there is a market there will be someone to cater to it, even if you have to register your domain in Anguilla.
What seems to be the most common G+ migrant destination, MeWe, is no exception. But as opposed to Gab its Far Right credentials are not as blatant, even though many of its groups are. This fact could just be a consequence of the first wave of migrants that came in. But WeMe implemented a walled-garden concept, as opposed to other social sites its social groups are closed. You can't just see random public posts where the blatant anti-social behaviors go full-frontal. But remain for long enough in the site, and you will see them. As opposed to Gab, MeWe seems interested in being part of polite society (they did make some changes after Apple kicked their App out of the App store for a few weeks). So that works in our favor. But there have been instances in which Far Right groups seem to have excessive influence in the running of the site, leading to the suspension of some anti-far-right accounts. A FB with a somewhat different balance of power. A country with a different style of government.
But the future is already in motion. Social media will evolve more and more into a public utility, and our online identities (with all of its social nets) will become more and more our property and less and less part of a closed platform. The Fediverse with diaspora (the other popular G+ migrant destination pluspora is a diaspora pod) is perhaps the first to go in that direction. But Tim Berners-Lee has joined the fray and has started to create the missing protocols to make this work, and avoid the walled-gardens. Data mobility is quickly becoming a requirement, decentralized social networks will quickly become the norm.
If this works (OpenID, WebID, and FOAF are some previous standards that point in this direction but have seen limited implementations), then we will stop thinking about what platform are we using or moving to. And, just as with e-mail, will just follow our friends wherever they choose to reside. Extremely simple directory sites like this one will lead the way. The Fediverse and the many disparate collaborating sites will lead the way.
Do note that Google is not getting rid of the "About Me" page nor their OpenID toolset, they will soon start another of their—starting to become infamous—social experiments. I hope they figure out a way to introduce circles into that new, open, distributed, and portable ecosystem. They see the writing in the wall.
Given the behavior from the G+ community I have seen in the last few months I would not be at all surprised if the extinction of G+ (intentionally or not) was seen as a way to kickstart the process, but letting the human G+ spores germinate all over the web. They chose not to create the tool themselves, they will figure out the way to monetize this new ecosystem when it starts taking shape, why spend the money themselves? MeWe is already feeling the influence of this diaspora. Many a programer have now clearly seeing the new opportunities that have now been created and are part of the social gold rush.
Evolution is brutal and a very curious thing. Old species have to die for new species to prosper.
