RFC: A more focused way to interact with social media

[nicholaschiang]

:dart: Pitch: This would be a slight pivot from the much smaller scoped Tweetscape vision (that other people already have) to the grander vision of changing the way we interact with social media to reduce doom-scrolling, encourage real connection, and otherwise foster in :sparkles: "the wisdom age."

1. Delete Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, etc.
2. Instead of wasting hours on your phone, you'll receive a weekly digest that contains a birds-eye view of what's been happening:
   • top articles shared by the folks within your circle (e.g. I'll be able to see the links that my teenage friends have discussed on their stories alongside the articles shared by subject-matter experts on Twitter);
   • recent stock sales and purchases made by the people you follow (this was inspired by Insider);
   • and, of course, posts (alongside tweets) from the folks you follow.
3. And if you ever do feel like doom-scrolling (e.g. you're waiting in line at the airport), you can do so in our app which, in addition to showing you a birds-eye view of everything that's been happening across all your social media platforms, is designed to focus your interactions around content creation and curation. Instead of simply consuming, you'll be creating summaries and digests you can share with others (e.g. @ntorba's "Twitter this week" idea).

:sparkles: Story time: A few months ago, I got to have a nice chat with a friend who had moved away (to Provo, UT) years ago. She had come back to Palo Alto for a short visit and so we had had a few minutes to chat at church. Fast forward to a couple days ago, she texted me (via Instagram DM) and we got talking about our summer and college plans. Fast forward to the day after that, I saw that she had re-posted a TikTok to her Instagram story. I follow her on Instagram (obv) but what I didn't know is that she actually posts more on TikTok than on Insta. So, I followed her on TikTok and now I have two places (not to mention Facebook and Snap) that I need to check to keep up-to-date.

FOCUS (what I'm calling this new idea of mine) would solve this inconvenience by having a single profile where everything a person has posted (from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc) are aggregated: a single place where you can see, in a timeline, everything a person has posted across their various social media accounts. We're bringing back the early days of Facebook magic (chronological feeds!) while ushering in the new age of federated, de-centralized social media (by powering our magic with DeSo ActivityPub tech).

We wouldn't be better than any of these existing social media platforms. We'd actually intentionally have fewer features, but more focused ones; features that encourage efficient social media consumption so you can stay on top of "the current thing" (and, of course, what your friends are up to) without wasting your life away on your phone.

:people_hugging: Clay: I may even go as far as to assert that this (not LinkedIn) is the missing half of Clay. While Clay helps you keep track of your existing connections, FOCUS would help you create new ones (while, of course, also helping you stay up-to-date with your existing ones by aggregating their social media posts from across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, etc). Perhaps being bought by Clay could even be a good exit strategy (though I'm not sure if they would have the capital :P).

:brain: Wisdom age: I also believe that this vision aligns quite well with the Roote mission of "building the wisdom age." IMO, it doesn't get much more "wisdom-age-y" than empowering people with a birds-eye view of their social media landscape (and, eventually, encouraging them to curate and share their own opinionated birds-eye snapshot of that landscape).

:clipboard: TODO: If this were to be what I work on these next couple of weeks, this is what I'd be up to:

• [ ] Validate vision with co-founders (@ntorba) and funders (@RhysLindmark, @brendon-wong, Shingai);
• [ ] Validate vision with customer interviews (finish organizing the list in #419 and start scheduling convos);
• [ ] Create a snazzy landing page (similar to Clay's) sharing that :point_up: vision;
• [ ] Put together high-fidelity interactive Figma mock-ups of MVP:
  • [ ] Aggregated profile page - a profile that shows everything a person has posted across all their social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, etc) in a chronological (searchable) timeline.
  • [ ] Aggregated feed - a sortable and searchable feed that aggregates updates people have shared across all their social media accounts (also, by default, in chronological order). This wouldn't simply show the content in full-view, however, as FOCUS should provide a more high-level view that easy to scan (instead of encouraging doom-scrolling behavior) and then allow you to click to deepen your focus on a single person's updates or posts.
  • [ ] Weekly (and/or monthly) digest email (that is essentially an email version of the feed... kinda).
• [ ] Finish merging #413 to integrate with Twitter via ActivityPub.
• [ ] Prioritize other integrations based on customer interviews and API ease-of-use. Currently, I'm thinking:
  1. Instagram;
  2. TikTok;
  3. LinkedIn;
  4. Facebook;
  5. Mastodon;
  6. Snapchat.

@ntorba @RhysLindmark @brendon-wong WDYT about all of this?

[nicholaschiang]

WIP Figma mock-up: https://figma.com/file/rTawG1WE4hiv3KeMBxbWbo

[ntorba]

@nicholaschiang this is an interesting idea, but I have some reservations.

The first one is this seems like a massive technical challenge. Dealing with the api's of all those platforms, especially ones like IG and tiktok, seems difficult because I don't think they want people scraping?

Second, from the conversations I've had, this isn't quite a migraine problem for people. For the most part, they'll just check both, or only check one and not worry about it too much. Would much money would you pay for this solution personally?

Lastly, I think this is hard for me to imagine because people are looking for vastly different experiences from each platform. Makes me think of this image from Stratechery:

People are going to twitter to collab and engage, while instragram is much more passive. This also relates to why their advertising and monetization models should be much more different.

All in all, I'd want to see a lot more interest in this from a lot more people before starting to build it. However, it is a fun thing to have in mind as we start to experiment with generalized protocols.

lmk what you think about that

[brendon-wong]

Like all ideas, I think that validation would be best! IMO nothing inherently wrong with aggregating across social media. A friend was recently looking for a message aggregator (a little different than a feed aggregator). As Torba mentions I do think judging if this is possible technically is a good starting point. In terms of different social media having different info, I think the challenge is less about the info on each platform, and more about whether we can surface the best info (gauging what’s valuable may be pretty hard). I do like the idea of avoiding infinite scrolling (but yeah that conflicts with the business of existing apps so gotta be careful there).