Ryan Broderick, author of the excellent internet-trendwatching blog Garbage Day, has posted a new video, about why the internet feels different now, and feels bad for many people. There are some fascinating ideas in there that I think are worth highlighting:

First is the observation that how TikTok is operating is a good representation for the current state of the entire internet; in the sense that it has become impossible to form a coherent narrative on what is happening on the internet. We used to (pretend!) be able to form a coherent idea of what the internet was thinking, mainly by just taking some viral tweets and sticking them in a news article.

This period is now truly over, and helpfully demonstrated by this article by The Verge, ‘TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen’. It showcases that the internet has fragmented, and that even posts with half a billion views can stay within their own corner of the internet, barely making an impact outside of their own space.

Ryan also says that he is a big believer in the idea that once you have a name for something that is happening online, it is pretty much already over. Based on this, he assumes that whatever will be the new status quo has already arrived, and that the rut that we feel might already be over, with a small pocket of the web already having figured out the new way of using the internet.

Personally I agree with the idea, but I also think that it is just a bit too early to say so. From my observations it seems like the next status quo way of using the internet is on the cusp of arriving, without fully being there yet. As Jeremiah Lee says here, ‘the next big social network is just the Web’, and that is something I strongly agree with. More specifically though, I think that the next big social network will be build on top of all the current social networks. I think the winner will not be Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads, but instead the next generation of products that can seamlessly interact will all of them. From there it can expand to incorporate the entire Web. With more and more work being done both from the protocol level (bridges) as well as the client level, that vision is now starting to appear.