What will the dominant social media protocol be at the end of 2028?
30
396
2029
9%
AT protocol (Bluesky)
70%
ActivityPub (Mastodon)
2%
Farcaster
5%
Nostr
0%
Bluesky
5%
Other, not launched before 2024
0.2%
Hive (hive.blog)
1%
Mana-channel (Manifold, if we ever do it)
0.4%
cohost
0%
Discord
0%
Tumblr
0.1%
Forums and/or BBSes make a huge comeback
2%
Other, launched before 2024
0.1%
RSS
3%
Threads

Dominance is defined as being the recommended industry standard or de facto standard---a majority of users.

If ambiguous (e.g., no clear dominant protocol due to difficulty counting true users), this will resolve to N/A.

Even if a centralized platform is still dominant (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), this will resolve to the most widely used decentralized protocol/industry standard.


Protocol: A system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information

A social media protocol needs to:
1. support sharing of content by users;
2. support interaction with the content of other users;
3. have permanence/persistency.

Counterexamples:
RSS---no interaction.
IRC and Matrix---not designed for async access with persistence.

Get Ṁ1,000 play money
Sort by:

Note that this was created with the old Parimutuel mechanism.

Small print update: If threads end up using Activity Pub and ActivityPub is dominant, both will resolve to YES in proportion to their final probs.

I'm also planning to merge the "others" answers.

FYI: If the devs add in the option, I'll N/A bad answers that are currently in the pool, such as "RSS"

bought Ṁ5 Mana-channel (Manifo...

I want to believe.

Related: https://manifold.markets/aashiq/what-will-the-dominant-microbloggin-8d73b9cf86ba

What will the dominant microblogging platform be at the end of 2028 (X, Threads, Bluesky, etc) ? [ READ DESCRIPTION ]
Dominance is defined by my best judgement of MAU's , or the best available metric. Note that the market will resolve to an ESTIMATED MARKET SHARE. In other words, it is NOT winner-take-all. Ie if X has 55% dominance, I want X to resolve to 55%. Friends have told me this is possible. If I find it is NOT possible to partially resolve a free response market, I will resolve it N/A. This market concerns the user distribution at 2028-12-31 23:59:59. However, it resolves somewhat later to allow for data to become available. My preference is to consider platforms, not protocols. Platforms are inherently mutually exclusive, so I would hope this all works out cleanly. I'm using the names of platforms and not protocols (ie Bluesky over AT protocol) in order to make the comparison to centralized services more apples to apples. That being said, I need the answers to be mutually exclusive. If someone makes an ActivityPub choice, we would only count the usage that is ActivityPub but NOT Mastodon. Overlap will resolve like so: First, in the direction of Platforms over Protocols Second, in the direction of whatever was added earlier. For example, consider the services added in the following order 1. Mastodon, 2. ActivityPub, and 3. Misskey. Mastodon and Misskey are based on the ActivityPub protocol. I would put users buckets in the order 1,3,2 -- preferring platforms over protocols and prioritizing history of adds. The history consideration is just to prevent a sort of exploitation if we have some kind of Russian nesting doll situation with multiple platforms and protocols. Related market: https://manifold.markets/jgyou/what-will-the-dominant-social-media [image][link preview]

If Meta makes a protocol that is a superset of Mastadon I assume that counts as Mastadon, but if they make a protocol that is only partially interoperable w/ Mastadon, how do you count that?

@xyz maybe a good analogy would be the slightly different sets of HTML tags recognized by different browsers. Everybody recognizes these standards as just "html". So I'd say: if that's the kind of iteration on ActivityPub we see, then sure this should still resolve to ActivityPub.

bought Ṁ75 of ActivityPub (Mastodon)

Betting on ActivityPub because lots of applications that use other protocols seem to be bridging to it right now, e.g. Hubzilla, Nostr etc. which will allow its use to grow alongside these other protocols. AP seems to be the gold standard right now and even if your new protocol is simpler: if you're joining in the fediverse you're probably also using ActivityPub

what's a social media protocol ?

@Odoacre rather than an application (twitter, facebook etc.) a protocol is a thing that applications can be built on that lets them talk to each other. Examples are ActivityPub which Mastodon, Calckey, Akkoma, etc. run off, AT which BlueSky uses, Zot which powers HubZilla, etc.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_Social

@Xe I am familiar with the protocol idea, but I'm not sure what a "social media" protocol is. Is IRC a social media protocol ? is Matrix a social media protocol ?

@Odoacre that's a good point! I had assumed messengers did not count but they can fit under some definitions of social media. I suspect @JGY is the only one who can give a solid answer to that

@Xe Yes. I agree with your characterization of a protocol.

I think that reasonable requirements for a social media protocol, are:
1. support sharing of content by users;
2. support interactions with the content of other users;
3. permanence/persistency.

RSS is not a social media protocol---no interactions.
IRC and Matrix are not social media protocols---they are not designed for async access with persistency.

The above definition seems broadly consistent with how people have been answering the question so far---basically listing Twitter and Reddit "clones."

boughtṀ100Nostr

@maciek Why so confident? Nostr seems to be much more obscure (and less user-friendly) compared to the other alternatives as of the time of commenting.

@duck_master Nostr has, by far, the best architecture. It is the simplest communication protocol out there. I think it's likely to become a base layer protocol (like TCP/IP or Bitcoin).

@maciek Thing about them being protocols means that people will find ways to connect them when possible. Apparently there's at least one bridge between ActivityPub and Nostr now: https://soapbox.pub/blog/mostr-fediverse-nostr-bridge/

If people can do social media interactions with Nostr users from elsewhere then it doesn't get as much of a "network effect" over other connected networks—so even while it has what technical superiority it has, there might be less incentive to switch if the alternatives are better (or better marketed) in enough other respects.

answered
Hive (hive.blog)
bought Ṁ5

A blockchain based social media site that I used to use. Formerly called Steemit before the Tron CEO bought it, which caused the users to hard-fork it.

bought Ṁ20 of Other, not launched ...

@Sinclair Wow. I had no idea that there were still people around using Steemit (or whatever it's called now).

bought Ṁ10 of AT protocol (Bluesky)

Whoops, I added a redundant option "Bluesky" without realizing that it was already added. Please ignore it.

More related questions