Have we reached peak social media?

Building new social media networks is hard. While the outliers accumulate massive value, they are actually few and far between, even when compared to other software categories. This becomes particularly depressing because many have taken the view that we have reached what can be described as peak social media. The notion is that newer generations have become tired of hanging out on social media, as there appear to be no new, fresh networks on the horizon.

So is innovation in social media dead? I don't think so. What I do believe is that for the foreseeable future, we won't see any new platform paradigms emerge because we are stuck with mobile phones as a computational platform. Instead, innovation will come from social-native apps, which use these platforms as a means of distribution. Here is my reasoning:

How new Social Media networks emerge

New social media networks emerge when they establish a new communication style and build a viable social graph around it. Communication styles describe unique methods, conventions, and tones through which users express themselves, share content, and interact within each platform. The communication style is dictated by the design of the primary unit of communication on the platform and the distribution method.

Historically, new communication styles usually came in distinct waves and were powered by new computation platforms and the capabilities these unlocked. The first wave launched when we started logging onto the World Wide Web and were primarily focused on digitizing our real-life social graph and perhaps extending it at the edges (e.g., Facebook, MySpace). Smartphones then shadowed our increasingly mobile lives and allowed us to share the ephemeral moments of our lives (Snapchat Stories). With Artificial Intelligence and recommendation engines, we were able to build ad-hoc social graphs around memes (TikTok, Reels).

Social Media Hunger Games?

Establishing a new communication style is a rare undertaking. You need to find one that has enough engagement potential—both in peak activity as well as sustainability. Once you have found a novel communication style with enough potential, you have credible defensibility if you scale it fast enough to build network effects around this communication style.

The social network industry is incredibly competitive. Instagram has taught Meta (then Facebook) how fast a newcomer can become a viable threat to your business. Snapchat then taught Meta that there is enough VC funding around for potential future threats not being interested in being acquired.

As a result, established social media players have been more cautious and more active in scouting new emerging communication styles and implementing them into their core products.

Where Will the Next Wave of Innovation Come From, Then?

What does this mean for new startups? Essentially, it has become even harder to develop a new, successful social media startup. If you find an interesting and emerging new method of communicating that gets traction, chances are that established players will copy it before you can become a viable competitor. The only way to break this logic would be to develop a new communication style that is so radically new that existing players won't be able to integrate it into their current products.

If we believe new communication styles are powered by new technology, the question arises as to what those could be. Many think that Gen AI will be a new paradigm that will shift our social media behavior. I am unconvinced that credible mass-appeal new communication styles will evolve around this. But even if I believe in this, I struggle to see the potential disruption for new companies. No social startup has any MOAT around Gen AI models. In fact, big social media players (e.g., Meta) are in a much better position to have any proprietary innovation here, plus they have the distribution. Sure, it is totally believable that we will have pure Gen AI influencers in the future, but they will likely just live on the likes of Instagram or X.

One potential new computational platform could be mixed reality. However, despite hundreds of billions of USD in investments from the largest tech players, mass adoption is still struggling. I am sure that one day some form of mixed reality powered by gesture control will appear, but I fear that both price and form-factor-wise, we are still years away from devices with mass appeal. For now, I believe we are stuck with our mobile phones for social networks.

So does that mean that innovation in social media is dead since there is likely no new technological shift on the horizon? Not quite.

The Limitations of Implementing New Communication Styles

There is a limit to established players copying new ideas even within our current computational platforms. This is because they can only incorporate a certain number of new communication styles without seriously diminishing their UX or having to completely revamp their app. For large players, this means that only communication styles that have continuous and high engagement are worthy of being integrated into the existing social graph. There is a middle ground of communication styles that might be able to build their own social graph but actually sit better in an existing one (see Clubhouse rooms, which are doing reasonably well on X).

What is completely untouched is what I call the Deathzone—these are essentially communication styles that might be engaging but are too narrow to build their own social graph. This is exactly where I believe the next wave of innovation in social media will come from: Social-native applications.

Past patterns

I believe this because, in the past, we have already seen that there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between smaller apps and communication styles embedded in an existing social network. For the apps, the benefit is also clear. They get to leverage the existing social graph that the network already offers.

An example of this is r/place, which features a multiplayer canvas where each user can place a pixel per minute. This led to the creation of factions, which coordinated to create large artworks. r/place is considered a great success for Reddit, boosting record numbers in terms of engagement. Another obvious example was games like Farmville, which gained a significant share of traffic for Facebook, particularly in the early days.

While I believe that these are interesting data points, the n remains small and so far still anecdotal. Why is that so? Because apps living on social require a certain environment, which so far no platform has truly met.

What do Social Apps require?

In order for social applications to thrive, they require a certain environment. This can be compared to an ecosystem. The main requirements are:

• A large enough distribution channel: Applications need a platform for distribution. The user base of the social network provides the upper limit of potential users. The larger the social network, the bigger the potential TAM for the social application.

• Open tooling and open social graphs: Social media platforms need to give access to sufficient tooling and also the social graph itself. Both are needed in order for the developed applications to be powerful and engaging. Customers have mobile apps or even modern web apps as their reference, and social apps will need to be competitive on those fronts.

• Common UI hubs: These applications need to be able to be embedded in the main UI hubs that the social networks use. For most social networks, this is essentially equivalent to the timeline. If they can't live in the timeline, the social apps will struggle to create a social experience. Without access to a common UI hub, the networks would become little more than a glorified login.

• Flexible monetization options: Lastly, the social media platforms need to provide flexible monetization options so that the applications can develop viable business models. The vast majority of popular social media platforms today are built around ad monetization, which might not be suitable for many apps.

Potential Social App Platforms and Current Examples

There are a number of platforms where these applications could potentially live. These are best split into two groups: new-gen decentralized platforms and legacy platforms. Both have pros and cons. New-gen platforms can start with an open canvas regarding monetization methods and their tech stacks. On the other hand, established platforms already have large social graphs that can offer a widespread distribution that apps can leverage. In my opinion, the most promising candidate platforms are:

New-gen platforms:

Farcaster: The concept behind Farcaster is built on the notion of decentralization. Rather than controlling the entire network like established players (e.g., Meta), Farcaster only develops the network but lets clients and other applications build their own applications freely upon the social graph. Developers can build anything from rather standard Farcaster clients to completely orthogonal applications.

The majority of the users use Farcaster via the Warpcast client, delivering an experience that can be described as being the closest to X. Recently, Farcaster introduced the concept of Frames, which can be described as micro-applications that live natively on the timeline. Think of it as a Tweet that has its own UI, including buttons, allowing it to run any kind of application. This created a Cambrian explosion of experimentation, introducing a number of new applications ranging from betting markets and e-commerce to games.

Farcaster has been able to develop a small, initial but dedicated user base. With approximately 500k registered users and just over 50k daily active users, it will be interesting to see if and how Farcaster will be able to break out of the initial crypto-related user base, but Frames have proven to be a promising experiment.

Lens: Lens is a decentralized social network initially built on Polygon but planning to migrate to zkSync. Similar to Farcaster, Lens is built on crypto rails and allows developers to build applications that can leverage the Lens social graph as a means to distribute. A number of apps have launched on top of Lens, and recent engagement on the platform has been picking up steam again.

Bluesky: Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging platform that spun out of X/Twitter.

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Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

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2:13 PM • Dec 11, 2019

No surprise, it is conceptually very close to X. Bluesky is built on a proprietary open protocol called AT Network. It provides open tooling for building third-party clients and access to the timeline. It also has its own AT Protocol Grant program.

Mastodon:  It is somewhat unfair to call Mastodon a newcomer, considering it launched in 2016. Nonetheless, the network gained interest after the acquisition of X/Twitter. Mastodon is a decentralized network with federated instances that cooperate but also moderate themselves. It offers an open API, which led to a wide variety of third-party clients.

'Traditional' platforms:

X: X is an interesting take because it once started with traces of the idea of open development. Many aspects of the current design of the network can be attributed to third party client ideas. Nonetheless, over time Twitter increasingly closed itself off, initially creating limitations for clients up to downright banning them. Today, there are still some applications with (the most rudimentary) X integration, such as Reader, which allows you to save Posts by DMing the bot account. However, as an app platform, X has become increasingly unsuitable.

Reddit: Reddit aka 'the front page of the internet', with its essentially unlimited number of subforums likely hosts thematically some of the broadest userbases of all social media networks. While Reddit's r/place has arguably provided the prime example of social applications, it also recently closed down API access, forcing third-party clients to cease operating.

Discord: With an initial strong focus on gaming and voice communication, Discord has since branched out to become the home of all kinds of communities. In 2024, the network launched Activities, which allows devs to add games and applications in Discords. Discord has also proven that it can be the primary interface for popular applications, such as Midjourney.

Telegram / TON: Telegram is an interesting platform because it somewhat bridges the gap between a traditional network and open economy with its TON L1 Blockchain . Telegram's TON ecosystem already has a large number of interactive applications called "Mini-Apps", that play natively in their Telegram messenger. Ton also has its own grant programme, where it already distributed $1.4M in grants. The biggest drawback these have is that Telegram Apps still somewhat need to build their own social graphs, because Telegram is conceptually closer to a messenger than a social network.

Analysing the current landscape

At the moment, it is fair to say that no network has truly emerged for hosting mass-popular social applications. This is because platforms either severely lack in tooling and openness or are just too small to be a viable platform for distribution.

In terms of tooling, innovation is certainly spearheaded by platforms such as Farcaster or Lens. These already allow the hosting of truly orthogonal applications and are also flexible with regards to the interaction methods. For instance, Farcaster allows bots, standalone applications, and in-timeline applications (Frames). This is essentially their bet that they will be able to build social graphs on top of these innovations. By contrast, other (and mostly legacy) platforms are more restrictive—most often you can actually witness them tightening their grip over time as they need to focus on monetization. Of all legacy platforms, Discord arguably provides the most powerful tooling and is already home to some interesting experimentation.

My take is that it is far from decided where the majority of these applications will eventually live. While most of the innovation in terms of social apps currently emerges from the Farcaster ecosystem, established players could copy this functionality, although there are challenges regarding the implications to their business model.

I personally think we are still in a t-1 timeframe for these platforms and also the majority of applications.

What’s In It? The Market Potential of Social Apps

In its end state, what would the potential of such networks that host social applications be? There are two factors to consider here—screentime and ARPU.

Traditionally, social media converted attention (aka screentime) to money via ads. When it comes to attention, social media networks are arguably the largest category out there. Out of roughly 3.5 hours of smartphone screentime, people spend approximately 2.5 hours on social media every day. This translates to an industry of roughly $200B in advertising alone.

One way to increase TAM is by extending screentime. If we believe that social networks could absorb current applications, another added 0.5 hours in screentime could translate into another $40B in advertising.

Another potential way to look at it is by increasing ARPU. Getting >$10 ARPU is already world-class for a social media network; by contrast, Android and iOS have an average ARPU of 22. If social platforms are able to absorb applications and social-fi them, they could be able to gain some of the mobile app store ARPU, which is a potential TAM of over $130 Billion.

Outlook

We are still very early when it comes to the concept of social applications. No platform so far has established itself as a home for that. New networks provide the tooling but still have fairly small social graphs that are insufficient distribution channels—for now. Established players have not yet provided the necessary tooling and APIs to create applications that can live on their platforms. However, I believe sooner or later, more major social networks will adopt in-timeline apps for richer engagement.

If you are building social applications, please feel free to reach out. I would love to connect.