November 15, 2023

Instagram and Twitter are homomorphic with respect to fundamental structures of communication. In both, individual users broadcast a feed of media to the platform, and receive broadcasts from other users either by subscribing directly to their feed or by browsing a selection of media curated by a personalized algorithm.

That the two platforms exist constitutes a redundancy. This is not equivalent to the redundant selection of functionally similar food products available to citizens of developed nations. In the case of similar foods, one brand of wheat flour is interoperable with other ingredients and with other brands of wheat flour. In contrast, one cannot broadcast an Instagram post on Twitter X, nor can they view one. Additionally, third-party client software can not effectively aggregate content hosted on these platforms, as accessing the data is locked behind proprietary protocols.

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In trying to diagnose the dysfunction of the modern internet, society has agreed on two related points:

1. Proprietary, opaque algorithms underlying content curation on the major platforms have profound consequences on participating societies. These societies begin to reflect the structures that emerge from the complex web of associative data connections which drive the algorithms. A messy mixture of global and local maximums (roughly correspondent to niches or communities) ebb and flow, caricaturing the way culture evolves within all societies.

2. Monetary incentives to drive engagement on the platforms lead both to a bias towards sensationalism and to users being encouraged to spend as much time scrolling through content as possible.

Societal adoption of open data protocols for every topologically distinct form of communication addresses both these issues. It does so in part by decoupling the hosts and clients of user generated content. Software clients control the means of curating the broadcasts they subscribe to, and content hosts necessarily interoperate with one another.

Global and local maximums are mitigated by more diverse and even user controlled algorithmic criteria. They still exist, but more closely reflect the inevitable structures that the humans using the protocols form in life, rather than the structures of the algorithms.

The issue of sensationalism and endless scrolling is an implementation detail of the client software. The open nature of the protocol means that choosing not to use a particular client doesn't preclude one from accessing the same data as that client could. Because our society is increasingly aware of the dangers posed by content platforms, users' ability to choose is of principle importance.

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One can conceptualize this model as various normalized data formats which each act as a sort of personal website for each participating user, ultimately controlling both the input and output of said data. In many ways the original static websites were a particularly flexible data format which happened to represent only one of these topologically distinct communications, the one-to-many form.

This model is intended to serve the rest of the forms, and to transform the default mode of user generated content from being hosted and controlled by monolithic platforms to being hosted and controlled by the users themselves, thus living up to the original promise of computer networks to allow us to break free from the shackles of mass media.