I watched most of the interviews at and around the Code Conference, which happened to be around the same time as Meta Connect this year. So my world has been filled full of decrypting what tech CEOs are actually saying. One of the stand-out stars is this open and frank conversation with The Verges Alex Heath and Mark Zuckerberg is well worth a listen or watch.
I’ve pulled out some quotes from the transcript I found interesting. I focussed on the first portion of the interview on Threads and ActivityPub because I don’t really have any interest in AI or Metas new products. However, I do care about their open protocol ambitions.
an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel, right? What’s the kind of emotional charge of it, and how do you come away from that feeling?
There was obviously some shade thrown here Elon and twitters way (I am still not calling it X). But there is a lot of truth in what he says about the way people use social networks is often dictated by the way they are designed. He goes on to say that “Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical” which is absolutely true. Not that the designers ever wanted to achieve this, but by leaning into fast-paced, post anything, get engagement from the whole user base, this is always where you end up. Something that gets worse with no work on curation and Elons ‘free speech’ nonsense.
how you seed the networks and the culture that you create there, I think ends up being pretty important for how they scale over time.
Mark and Adam Moseri have the luxury of building a network from the start, bootstrapping it to one of the ones they already have for a user base, and then leaning on their ability to scale up. No other network in history has had this, and Twitter certainly did not have the luxury of creating a culture. Sure, Threads might be building while the plane is in the air, but Twitter is bailing out a sinking ship.
a lot of people just don’t want to use an app where they come away feeling bad all the time, right? I think that there’s a certain set of people will either tolerate that because it’s their job to get that access to information, or they’re just warriors in that way. They want to be a part of that kind of intellectual combat.
As someone who got a lot of value from Twitter for years, and then didn’t any more, I knew exactly what Mark was saying here. It always left me feeling bad about the world, and no amount of curation and blocking could fix it.
Even when the world is moving towards richer and richer forms of sharing and consumption, I think that text isn’t going away, it’s still going to be a big thing. But I think how people feel is really important.
By all measures, text-based things should be dead by now. So many times have we been told voice first this, short form video that. Yet, text-based interaction just will not die.
There as a whole load of quotes about ActivityPub and Threads. Many of which cover the same ground, so I might not comment on them all.
I’ve had our team at various times do the thought experiment of like all right, what would it take to move all of Facebook onto some kind of decentralized protocol? And it’s like that’s just not going to happen. There’s so much functionality that is on Facebook that it’s way too kind of complicated.
Interesting that Mark would at least claim to have thought about moving Facebook more open. His statement makes sense, but the constant closing down and siloing of information speaks for itself. I don’t think Mark is lying here, but words are easy to say.
one of the interesting things that’s evolving around this kind of the Twitter competitive space is a lot of the others. There is a real ecosystem around that and I think it’s interesting.
my view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be.
I actually think that we’ll benefit and we’ll be able to build better quality products by our products, making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.
I think making it so they can use an alternative but can still interact with people on the network will make it so that that product also is more valuable. You can increase the quality of the product by making it so that you can give people access to all the content even if it wasn’t created on that network itself.
There is something encouraging about these statements, but they all feel a little too spun. I think there’s a shed load of advantages to Meta being able to point to ActivityPub interoperability, not least when questioned about timeline sorting and content moderation.
maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into.
There’s kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don’t think that people like feeling locked into a system. So in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave.
This is more about enticing people in whilst also letting them consume other’s content than it is about users leaving and going elsewhere.
in a way that actually makes people feel more confident investing in a system if they know that they have freedom over how they operate.
if we can build threads on this, then maybe we can over time, as the standards get more built out, it’s possible that we can spread that to more of the stuff that we’re doing.
I think Meta see themselves as creating something that grows and expands on top of ActivityPub. I’ve said before that they would look to become the ‘blue bubble of new social media’, that offers more if you move to their Federated server – and then they can monetise your attention.
This whole conversation makes me feel more confident than ever that Threads will open up, but just a little. There are numerous moving parts, and they still do not really know where they stand with the EU and being outlined as a ‘gatekeeper’. So it’s a wait and see game, just don’t hold your breath.
There’s a shared frustration that comes with these posts that is shared throughout my journaling and my photography. That is that my life is pretty mundane and built on load sod routines. My life is not one that social media would find very fascinating, and certainly is not all sunshine and rainbows.
This week, I have been preparing for my birthday and also numerous big projects coming up in my working life. Reflected by feeling as if this is the calm before the storm. I celebrate my 40th birthday (yes, I am that old) on Wednesday and before that, I have two days of kick off meetings. Oh, the joys! I hate my birthdays.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Social-Media Metrics – Those view counts on Twitter, TikTok, and Netflix? Be skeptical.
Walter Isaacson Calls Into Question the Accuracy of His Own Book – I might read the Musk book because I liked Isaacson’s other work. His podcast appearances have been pretty interesting too.
These 14 Small Mindset Shifts Will Change Your Life
Working remotely is a competitive hiring advantage again – you can tell a lot about a company by their response to working from home. As with most things in life, it boils down to trust and ego.
Before myself and Nati recorded the first episode of bring your own device, we made promises to each other. To be honest about everything. To be Apple fans, enjoy Apple devices but not be Apple apologists. To not be another voice in the sea of Apple bloggers that spent most of their time explaining why your opinions are wrong.
Sadly, the podcast no longer exists, but that idea that was core to everything we talked about stuck with me. I’ve never shied away from calling out mistakes from Apple, and tried very hard to not fall into fanboy traps. This is an extremely long-winded way of setting up a way to say I was right about the iPhone 12 design all along!
I made a (feeble) video about the design almost as soon as I felt it because I was amazed at the massive step back. I read in amazement all the words that were then written to defend it. Claiming that it was a brilliant design, and perhaps I was “holding it wrong” (again). There is nothing wrong with opposing opinions, and some people seemed to genuinely like the update, so I did question myself a little.
However, the iPhone 15 smoothed out edges make me feel vindicated. Even more so when the same people telling everyone that the design was great, are now saying the iPhone 15 update is much better. There is absolutely no denying it. A combination of the curved edges, the titanium frame and the slightly slimmer bezels make the phone feel much smaller than it actually is.
I’ve gone up to the max this year with zero regrets now this phone actually fits in my hand! My pinky would like to formally thank Apple designers for thinking about the shape of human hands.
The frantic realisation that I hadn’t written my weekly post happened about 20 minutes ago. Not that anyone cares but with all the excitement of Apple announcements it completely slipped my mind. So excuse the two week update of what I’ve been up to. Weirdly mostly tech related.
Continue to be awesome, and that’s an order but make sure you take it very easy my friends.
🤙
I have already seen about a billion of these types of posts around the web. So why not add mine, with a twist. Here follows the shortest summery of my thoughts I can make.