Problem: A social media platform that pulls data across multiple open platforms. A primary reason why there has only been 1 platform made in the last decade to disrupt big social media companies, is the difficulty of setting up extensive social graphs. Social graphs are the collection of user profiles and relationships across a network and are usually the most guarded part of any social media platform. This makes it hard for social media startups to overthrow the major, if somewhat old, players.
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Solution: Start a social media platform that takes advantage of shared social graphs by pulling data across multiple open platforms, with a focus on building a large and diverse user base. Regardless of features or implementation, social graphs can be the deciding factor on the viability of any social media app. For example, despite all the hype it gathered up and its relatively unique concept of only allowing you to post your friends, Paparazzi was unable to gather enough of an audience to make posting feel rewarding. From a regular user’s perspective, if you post on a social media platform without your friends, did you even post at all?
A short graph demonstrating how short-lived Paparazzi’s hype was (Graph Source)
But this poses a major challenge to the traditional social media model. You must make an app good enough to reach that point where you can build your own little walled garden. However, there’s a serious question as to whether that’s truly possible for new startups. Notably, the biggest disrupter in this space in the last decade, TikTok, can attribute much of its success to crossposting its content on other platforms. By embracing cross-posting at the beginning, TikTok essentially hijacked the social graphs of the other larger social media platforms.
A natural extension of this idea is building an app where integration with other platforms is not just an early growth strategy but the core of the platform. In addition to addressing the aforementioned startup difficulties with gaining traction with users, the sourcing of users from the diverse array of platforms it shares social graphs with could also lead to a greater resilience of the platform to market changes. Building a “walled garden” of users is only successful if you are the biggest. For example, consider Snapchat stories. It was one of the smaller social media giants taking risks and trying something new with the stories format. It quickly built up a sizable following but was effectively crushed when Instagram pushed out their own copy with a much bigger user base. The time and money wasted on that project could’ve been useful for the struggling platform if it utilized shared social graphs. This would be achieved by making the path of least resistance for users to stay on their one favorite app with the most optimal features through controlling for the network effect on a massive scale. To define the network effect in simple terms, the more users that are on the app, the better the connections and experience are for the average user, attracting even more people to the app. Controlling this gives social media startups a competitive edge by leaving only one thing for them to worry about: making the best features.
Technically speaking, the biggest challenge for setting up an app like this is making the right bet on which protocol to use. Right now, ActivityPub is dominating the field through its simple standardization and low engineering overhead, but that’s not to say that there isn’t competition, Bluesky’s implementation of the AT protocol looks just as, if not more, promising. “We’ve designed a protocol that has three big things we think are missing from the Mastodon ecosystem: account portability, global discoverability, [and] composable, customizable curation and moderation,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber recently told The Verge.
Finally, the business would tap into a rising trend in social media and tech in general: decentralization and democratic systems (think cryptocurrency, robinhood, mastodon, etc.) That’s precisely the common thread between the protocols, the only real difference between them is the philosophy used to arrive at that destination. It’s very much a budding sector ripe for early investors. As Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, who worked on Twitter predecessor Odeo, said:
“There’s a whole community of people doing these experiments at these projects that are all learning from each other and sharing things back and forth and with the overall hope and idea that we cannot make the same mistakes we made last time,”
Regardless of what protocol you decide to go with, the internet is still far from oversaturated, with it expected to grow to cover 90 percent of the 6 and over population by 2030 (adding 3 billion users to the internet). Not to mention that the current social media market is valued at 49 billion dollars. And although you won’t see Facebook giving up its insanely huge social graph anytime soon, Threads is set to adopt the ActivityPub standard in the future, injecting over 100 million registered users into the fediverse, a group of federated social media groups that may include some familiar names including Masatdon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and Peertube.
Contributed by: David Salinas (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)