On Social Networks

I'm currently working on a bunch of product and technology ideas and dive into the topic of federated social networks and networking in general. Here's some of the outcome.

I've been working for XING for over ten years. XING has been a professional social network and direct competitor to Linked In and has even been the market leader in German speaking countries.

However, centralised social networks have certain dynamics and XING's star was sinking and it has turned away from the social part. I still think that some of its features had been interesting and I am still interested in some of the mechanics of social networks.

Also I - just like probably everyone else - have been using all of them. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok. Later Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and so on. And I was especially fascinated from federated and decentral networks and from the "bllionare exit".

At first I searched for a new home of my favourite images -previously posted in Instagram. THe first article looks into the federated alternatives and their capabilities:

Flashes vs PixelfedI've made an experiment. I ran the two Instagram alternatives Pixelfed and Flashes (Bluesky) against each other.

Then, I guess it was during a meetuo organised through meetup.com, some of us had the idea to build that on our own. Fully open source and federated.

I immediately dived into the architecture and the protocols they are using. So here's my summary on this.

Federated Social NetworksProbably the first piece of SciFi is a story written by Johannes Kepler in the early 17th century.

And finally, I created the pith for the new social network / groups platform / meetup site we will be working on in the future. It still has it's temporary name "meetdown", but I'm sure I can update this very soon.

Meetdown - A PitchSomethig seems to be missing in the landscape of social networks. So why don't we try to build it?