The resurgence of the open web with social media protocols

I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon as the prominent implementation), and AT Protocol from Bluesky.

Open standards in social media could be as powerful as open standards have been for direct and private communication (Email). What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web.

The Internet was built upon open standards - HTTP, URL, TCP/IP, DNS, HTML. A vast many valuable internet businesses have built on these "shoulders of giants". ActivityPub and AT Protocol are built with open standards philosophies, and could similarly enable a new playground of innovation, with openness, ownership and interoperability at their core.

I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in 3rd party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space.

Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do.