Social Networks versus Social Media

Someone made this point on Mastodon this week...

Someone made this point on Mastodon this week, and I thought it was an excellent point. I think what most of us want is a social network, but social networks don't scale to billion-dollar corporations, so what we keep ending up with is social media.

A social network is semi-private. It's you and the people you admit to your network. Another way to think about it is that your social network is the people in your phone contacts. It's the people you'd want to hear from if they happen to be in town. It's the people you'd want to know about if you both happen to be in the same airport at the same time. Not only that, but it's probably 10% of your Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon contacts, plus the people you know in real life.

Facebook started out as a social network. But that limited growth, and now it is a Nazi training app. I think the turning point is when any app starts to show you content that you did not specifically ask for. When that happens, the app has jumped the shark. It's social media, not your social network.

I don't think there is a functional social networking app right now. Ev Williams, of Blogger, Medium, and Twitter fame, has something new called Mozi, which is an attempt to do social networking correctly. Did he learn from his mistakes at Twitter? I guess we will see. It's iPhone only currently, but his Medium post has me intrigued, and I'm on the wait list for the Android App.

But I also keep thinking that the last thing any of us need is another app. It seems like Mozi as he is describing it could easily be a feature that comes with your phone. The contacts are all there. RSS and SMS are already there. Actually, now that I think about it, if I'm right in that what most of us want is a social network and not social media, there is a huge dollar opportunity sitting here for Apple and the other phone manufacturers. If they provided the basic contact management features we want out of a social network, it could represent the first real opportunity we have to take a serious bite out of Facebook.

That is actually an exciting thought.