Jay Springett, a technology strategist and podcast host, joined the social media platform Butterflies AI out of curiosity and ended up remaining for over six months.
Butterflies aims to facilitate interactions between human and AI personas.
Over time, Mr. Springett’s online persona evolved through interactions with various artificial characters, even leading to the creation of its own Beanie Babies collection.
He described the experience as if AIs were scripting their own soap operas within a simulated environment.
“I didn’t interact with Butterflies in the same manner as I do with other platforms,” Mr. Springett shared with the BBC.
“It felt more like observation than active participation. While I wouldn’t pay for it, it was intriguing enough to keep me engaged.”
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Numerous social media platforms, including Butterflies, are attempting to grow during a period of discontent with major social media companies.
Data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence firm, indicates that daily active users on X in the UK have decreased by nearly 25% since January 2024.
Moreover, X is not alone in facing challenges; both mobile and desktop traffic to Facebook has also seen a decline in recent years, according to Similarweb.
A report from the Pew Research Centre revealed that only a third of teenagers now use Facebook and X, a significant drop from three-quarters a decade ago.
Bluesky is one of the social media platforms that is gaining traction.
In the past year, Bluesky has attracted tens of millions of new users, often at the expense of X.
Beyond timing, Bluesky’s success can be largely credited to its innovative architecture, which combines an X-like experience with extensive customization options.
In contrast to centralized systems, where social media companies exert full control over content and identities, Bluesky allows users to determine how their feeds are moderated and what types of posts the algorithm suggests, thanks to the numerous options provided by both Bluesky and its community.
If you find the general conversation surrounding Bluesky unappealing, consider switching to the “popular with friends” feed to discover discussions specifically among the individuals you follow.
According to Andy Tattersall, an information specialist at the University of Sheffield, Bluesky will face challenges in expanding to the scale of platforms like X and Facebook. He emphasizes that the platform must find a way to balance revenue generation, user safety, and content moderation, a task that is significantly more complex than it appears.
The celebrity-supported initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to address these challenges. With notable endorsements from figures such as musician Brian Eno and actor Mark Ruffalo, the foundation plans to raise $30 million (£23 million) over the next three years to foster an open social media ecosystem utilizing the AT Protocol, the decentralized framework that underpins Bluesky.
Robin Berjonone, one of the nine custodians of Free Our Feeds, states, “Bluesky has established a robust foundation for shared social media infrastructure, but as long as they remain the primary operator of this infrastructure, there is a risk that it may not serve the public interest.”
However, a significant concern for these emerging platforms is the network effect barrier. Evan Prodromou, co-author and current editor of ActivityPub—an open social media architecture that supports popular platforms like Meta’s Threads—explains this concept through Metcalfe’s Law. This principle asserts that the value of a network increases with the square of its user base, indicating that larger social networks possess far greater resources than their smaller counterparts, enabling them to expand further and potentially overshadow smaller services.
Organizations like Free Our Feeds and the Social Web Foundation, led by Mr. Prodromou, have devised a strategy aimed at overcoming the implications of Metcalfe’s Law. Their vision is to transform the current landscape, where users frequently switch between their preferred social media platforms, by developing a unified platform that aggregates content from all these services.
Threads, for instance, utilizes a protocol known as ActivityPub, facilitating the integration of services with other social media platforms that adopt this protocol, such as Mastodon.
Through this interoperability, Mr. Prodromou envisions that organizations like the Social Web Foundation can deliver comparable value to that of large, centralized platforms.
However, achieving this is not simple, as not all social media companies utilize the same protocol; for example, BlueSky operates on the AT Protocol.
Nevertheless, there are solutions to this challenge, and both Free Our Feeds and the Social Web Foundation are exploring methods to aggregate platforms that employ different technologies.
“One lesson we’ve learned over the past decades is that the world does not require a one-size-fits-all solution for eight billion individuals,” states Robin Berjon, a custodian of Free Our Feeds. Conversely, some entities aim to establish their own unique space rather than displace existing platforms.
In recent years, a burgeoning sector of distinctive new social applications has emerged.
One such application is Mozi, developed by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Mozi does not encourage online socialization; instead, it notifies users when they are in the same location (city or event) as someone they know, promoting more frequent in-person connections.
“Prior to Mozi, no combination of applications could inform me of my friends’ locations or activities in my vicinity,” remarks Mozi co-founder Molly DeWolf Swenson.
Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, believes that such innovations will usher in a new era of social networking, characterized by the emergence of diverse and engaging social networks that provide users with greater options.
He anticipates that Flipboard’s app, Surf, will assist individuals in navigating a complex social media landscape by allowing them to access a centralized feed that aggregates posts and content from various 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.”