I couldn’t find a topical cover image that wasn’t cheesy so I went royalty free group pic of dogs. You’re welcome.

Ok so I keep finding this idea of portability; of community, of audiences, of reputation, coming up in conversation.

Why? And what’s next?

Of course Elon isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom of the problem. X/Twitter is struggling. There are different opinions on why, but it is no doubt struggling. It is certainly a struggle to use — my notifications are majority spam and it feels like most of the content is revenue farming and/or talking about Elon. People are finding their handles taken away, platform usage restricted, things some thought wouldn’t happen at Elon’s twitter. But inside all the noise, the people and brands who have built up followings and/or communities on the platform have no real way to take it with them — but they are getting fed up.

This isn’t just a brands, advertisers, and influencers thing. There’s plenty of frustration from users too. Their timelines are a mess. Reach varies widely. “X Verified” spam bots run rampant. Creator revenue sharing dialed up “engagement farming” to “revenue farming” making it harder than ever to find signal — and to find your people — amongst the noise.

But community migration to another platform is a daunting coordination effort at a time when it’s hard to reach people and it is unclear where to go. There are no doubt some interesting alternatives like Farcaster, Mastodon, and many others, but hard to say where this all goes. Maybe everyone should just go touch grass more. We should. We should do that.

Perhaps the biggest switching cost is rebuilding reputation.

People work hard to build reputation. Whether through follower counts, formerly through verified badges, eBay stars, Reddit karma, or other forms of clout. Oh man, remember Klout?

These things are sticky by design, meaning they were designed to drive engagement and retain users within a walled garden.

Many people who have invested time in building their rep on Twitter, for example, are not surprisingly the ones most bullishly supporting Elon.

They are basically bagholders of an illiquid currency — their Twitter following.

And even if they’re not Elon fans, they’re still trying to make it work — like cooking up their own script to make reporting spam bots easier.

We saw a version of this with the launch of Threads. It took seconds to stand up your Threads account, port over your Instagram profile, and follow everyone you were already following. Not sure what else is happening there just yet, but the portability is a start.

Now let me export/import my followers (and follows) from another platform, and give me suggested accounts, or content, based not on the interests I have to manually select, but on my reputation. A seasoned eBay sneakerhead. A tortured but resilient Phillies fan. A top Spotify listener to Turnstile.

Or flip it around. Make it easy for me as a brand to bring tailored content and campaigns to my most engaged people, customers, fans, whatever. We’re seeing the early days of this with Spotify promoting concert presales to top listeners. But it wouldn’t take too many dots connecting to seriously reduce the noise in the concert ticket market and let real fans, not just real rich fans, get to these high demand shows. No joke — Taylor Swift could fix this by making a few demands around sale and resale with reputation-gated audiences.

In social media, this is for sure a phase 2 scenario, but I think we’re close to seeing the “big change” happen. Elon and Jack, in theory, see an open and decentralized future for social media. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri gave a whole Ted Talk on this stuff and seems to really see the portable audiences thing. But will one of them lead the charge?

Most executives and shareholders will struggle to give up control and embrace a paradigm shift, but the ones who can peek over the walls of their garden will see the opportunity is way bigger.