My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions

Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances.

That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.

It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)

Social media compromises

- asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising

I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”

Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.

You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.

I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared

I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications.

Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time

I predict 2026 will see a mass return to self-hosted blogging (and the Linux desktop, natch).

The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR:

1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution

2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example

3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques

I still have yet to see a BlueSky link in the wild.

I suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that it’s presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the ‘Open Social Web’.

You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.

Maybe I’m seeing things the wrong way.

My anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. I’d say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isn’t happening.

Does anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her?

I loved her compilations.

> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.

That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.

As others here below have noticed, there is no match between actual data and predictions made by the authors.

Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why?

>> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack — PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure — will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company."

Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.

social network, and to some degree open internet, is a millennial thing, it will die out as millennials get older.

can't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen.

Bluesky? Fediverse? Really?

Sponsored by bluesky

please put more work into AI generated content

X or Bsky will likely evolve/become replaced by the social network where every tweet is an instant poll, here's a mockup I found:

https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20