created 2025-06-06, & modified, =this.modified
rel:Improvement to social media
tags:y2025technologydesignindie-web
So we could all have our own website, if we wanted to and the services grew towards making that (or one of these decentralized social media sites.)
But ignoring that, I am imagining a world where the late, pre-collapse Myspace-style of allowing HTML customization.
Right now if someone posts content that is in poor taste, it can be expunged from a feed and the spread of it ceases (to an extent). The policing policy has isolated the content with the design and the social media landscape is homogenized (compared to Facebook of the same era).
What I am curious about is if we had kept with the myspace model of allowing a greater degree of flexibility of design of personal landing pages
Right now everything is feed focused, designing your personal landing page was de-emphasized outside of initial impressions. (Though even within the rigid frameworks of Instagram, we see some attempts at variety within bounds – such as images that serve as page-level designs, or slicing images seamlessly to work across multiple grids. Even a collage has elements of this design rebellion.)
But the question I had was how a customizable landing page would have changed enforcement of policy, and if the very design or access to the page would be subject to censorship (if a prohibited wav file plays, or pornographic image is present.)
It’s also noted that on the web client the design remains customizable (in effect, if you wanted to you could create your own island fully editing the speech of others, and how their text is presented.) This will just be personal, and never conveyed to the canonical design (though as a thought experiment digression you can wonder the effect if everyone designed their own “view” like put considerable effort into the design of the page that would be only visible through their browser. If we view the feed like a design we curate, it does have a feeling of Extended Self. But I was thinking along the lines of how an isolated page can then leak such as in screenshots of your personal page (“someone saying cool skin!“) or if adoption of elements occurs on a independent level if the developers would incorporate features that were once solipsistic into the macro, community design).
Also a flaw with the above, everyone uses apps which are fixed in presentation (dark or light mode and that’s it.)