I was looking at the apple App Store section for iOS apps for social networking. And I noticed a few things, first, Meta apps dominate. Second, somehow apple mixes in social media and dating apps in to the same category… odd. Thirdly I noticed that bluesky is ranked #99 out of 100 for Aotearoa New Zealand, where I’m based.
There are dozens and dozens of apps on that list I’ve never heard of. There’s almost no press about them, yet clearly lots of people use them and more are installing them every day. In some way, instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, nostr, threads, t2, post.news, and all these other apps are a kind of high brow social networking.
The kind of projects that get written up in the Colombia journalism review, Forbes, the New York Times, and even TechCrunch.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/bluesky-dorsey-musk-twitter.php
Then there are tons of other apps, which are used just as widely or more, which nobody every talks about. For years discord was one of these underground apps, millions of users but gamers don’t count, so the press didn’t cover them.
Commanding the public narrative is good, useful, causes folks to want to try new protocols like nostr, but let’s not forget that what matters is folks using it and getting value. Not the press coverage. Twitter didn’t start out with lots of press attention, instead it started out being useful and fun to use for the people on it, ignoring the rest of the world.
When TechCrunch first covered twitter, the big question was, is it interesting at all? Was this the stupidest idea in the history of startups?
