Websites are for humans.
The following text has not been touched by any LLM. There might be plot holes and loose, untied ends. It's called "The Weave". It will come together at the end.
For a few days I noticed these weird surveillance camera videos in my Instagram feed (which I'm sometimes scrolling through despite knowing better). I saw a bunch of cat videos that led me to believe they weren't real, but AI generated. Then I remembered that OpenAI just released Sora 2 and how they attempt to become an all-in-one video platform/social network for AI slop and how some techno-edge-lords claim OpenAI just made any tech stack obsolete, because AI is going to do this or that, create Spotify playlists with AI generated music and so on. I don't follow that too closely, but I'm open to AI (hence OpenAI ^^) therefore I'm thinking about it.
So I prompted my brain to see what it comes up with of what the future might hold: From my and others' point of view, what's going to happen is, people will abandon commercial social media, with its restrictions, its demented influencers peddling garbage, its AI slop and its inflammatory algorithmic cortisol-inducing shock content. What finally will break people's brains (and I extrapolate that from my brain) is the decision fatigue that is growing, that we now have to figure out if a funny cat video is real or the product of some sicko who burns down a forest because he thinks it's funny to generate a video of a cat taking a dump into the foamy, rose petal decorated bath water with the artificial cat owner in it freaking out.
I'm not opposing AI. There are some cases where it helped me a lot, but there is also evidence of how it keeps people from getting things done. There is evidence that people grow tired of those fata morganas that AI creates. Fata morganas of work being done, and when you look closer, it's nothing. It's an anamorphic sculpture[1] that looks great from that one angle and if you move to see it from a different angle, it's just a bunch of crap piled on each other.
The human touch will become more important, and more expensive. Artisanal quality time. Professional writers and programmers have more to do than ever, because they have to give back the human touch to generated word-salad or make vibe-coded software secure and efficient.
I have no idea what social networks are being replaced with. It's going to be more fragmented, that's for sure. Different smaller platforms, maybe even non-public platforms (meeting at a bar?) and intranets.
And that might lead to a revival of the two principles established by the IndieWeb movement: POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site).
Make your own website the single source of truth. Post there first and share links to whatever web service is currently hyped. Or post on those platforms, but pull that content back into your own website.
Both principles have some caveats. POSSE has to deal with web services that downrank external links. PESOS has to deal with limited programmatic access to APIs (try to fetch an Instagram or LinkedIn post, it costs money), but in any case, it's worth it to try and keep control over the things you create commercial/professional or private content.
