I keep thinking about whether there’s a place for a social network that’s subscriber-based rather than ad-based, supports longer-form posts, and has robust access controls. Maybe it’s a niche nothing fills because nobody wants that, but maybe it’s because it’s presumed (likely correctly) that something like that can’t scale to Twitter or Facebook levels. But maybe if it was designed with the assumption that a mere million users would be just fine… hmm.

This connects back to musings months ago about LiveJournal, which I continue to believe got some crucial things right—their platform was resistant (not immune, but resistant) to harassment on a technical level in ways that Twitter and Facebook will clearly never be. There’s a lot of other things LJ clearly dropped the ball on, from management issues to basically missing the importance of mobile for years, but there are still lessons there that nobody else picked up on.

(And, yes, since everyone who knows about Dreamwidth asks if I know about Dreamwidth, yes. They’re lovely people and I admire what they’re doing, but Dreamwidth in 2017 is, from a user experience perspective, pretty much LiveJournal in 2002.)