Ben identified this risk in the talk, so I don't want to give the impression it's something they're not aware of. What I'm trying to describe here is the weird feeling of double consciousness, where Ben pitched things that I've advocated for myself, and I was able to respond to them as if I was hearing them for the first time. Understanding some of the objections I've encountered from the inside, for a change.

(2/?)

I've posted here at least a couple of times about the difference between "social networks" (many-to-many, relationship-based), and "social media" (one-to-many, content-based). I said that the fediverse can accommodate both, but they come with very different design and deployment considerations.

(3/?)

I've noticed that mainstream use of "social media" is mostly following Jonathan Haidt's usage to describe only the mostly parasocial DataFarming platforms;

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/podcasts/jonathan-haidt-strikes-again-what-you-vibecoded-an-update-on-the-forkiverse.html

So in response, I'll reframe the above as 2 kinds of social networks;

* social communication networks: many-to-many, relationship-based, ephemeral, eg Mastodon, Friendica, Misskey, GoToSocial

* social publishing networks: one-to-many, content-based, persistent, eg PeerTube, FunkWhale, WriteFreely, BandWagon

(4/?)

Now having given these software projects as examples, I want to make it clear I'm describing use patterns, either of which can be applied to any software.

After decades of blogging, I can't help thinking of what I do on Mastodon as publishing. I link to my old posts and dig through them to find stuff, just like I do on my blogs. Conversely someone could use PeerTube to do video blogging, auto-deleting their old posts after a while like people do with their micro-posting accounts.

(5/?)

Sure, now that Loops exists, it's probably the better choice for posting ephemeral microvideos, as part of a social conversation, like we do with text micro-posts. But Loops isn't constrained to this kind of social communication usage. It supports videos up to 3mins long, and people could just as easily use it to publish videos they might otherwise put on a YouTub channel. In the hopes they'll still be watched and valued many years hence.

(6/?)

Some of the considerations for social publishing services, that aren't so much of an issue for social communication services;

* persistence and responsible sunsetting

* storage and bandwidth costs

* accountable governance

* Bring Your Own Domain

To be clear, I'm not saying these things aren't helpful in communication services, they certainly are. They're just not as mission critical as they are in publishing services.

(7/?)

Take music publishing as an example. If artists commit to making bandwagon.fm the primary online home for their music, they need to be sure that it will continue to exist, and they will get plenty of notice before it's shut down. Which means the people running it need to have a plan for how they will cover the costs of storing and serving a growing collection of music files, long term.

(8/?)

We all know about the ways tech founders have sold their souls for funding to keep their platforms online; ads, Venture Capital, acquisition by corporations, or becoming one (IPO). Obviously we need ethical alternatives for social web services.

But not just alternative funding models. We also need alternative governance models, which keep the operators of services accountable to the people using them.

(9/?)

A service like bandwagon.fm could be a co-op, owned by the artists whose music it hosts. It could be a social enterprise, whose constitution prioritises the needs of those artists over the financial interests of owners.

But however its governance is structured, one of the best ways to keep services accountable is the freedom to leave. So social publishing services need to enable publishers to use their own domain names for account and post URLs, and provide full account export.

(10/?)