Dead, really? Maybe it was the lmgtfy link that tripped the modbot.
> if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
I think that is backwards. Starting a blog is as easy as starting a Facebook account. The problem is that a blog does not give you the "engagement" of a social network and therefore can not compete for your attention against the very fine-tuned engagement machines of Facebook et al.
At the end of the day, content production in social networks follow a Pareto distribution. A small percentage produces the majority of the content and the rest is just there to share or produce noise. If you remove the tools that produce noise, you remove any reason for the majority to join. If you remove the strings that pull the noisy majority, you don't have a "social network". This is why my feeling is that "a social network with no engagement" is an oxymoron.
Yes you're right, the engagement is the most important part.
It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network.
I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people want to comment & subscribe, I'd say that you could cut almost all other social network features and it would work to a degree.
My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tech because they don't have much to gain by adopting it.
Totally agree, just think that we're talking about the same thing.
The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem.
I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.
I really don't think it is a problem of "being difficult for non-techies".
I think that techies gave up on it. Even techies want to chase metrics, taking whatever shortcuts they can to build an audience, "growth hacking" and that includes playing the game by the rules of Big Tech.
As an example: I am working a lot with the blockchain/web3 community the past years and every company/project uses medium for writing their articles, have a strong Twitter presence and rely on Reddit for forum announcements. Nowadays it's getting worse that a lot of projects are adopting Discord for group chat. If even the uber-techies and supposedly defenders of decentralized are giving up on fundamentals of the web, why would the non-techies?
Automattic made its fortune by developing and hosting Wordpress for people who are not tech savvy and wanted to have its place to write.