this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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51
Why Do Open Source Social Media Platforms Seem to Copy Each Other? Are There Any Truly Innovative Ones? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Davy_Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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I love to see the diversity of software increase. Once we clone all the major ones we can start innovating to the point where you have something completely new and bespoke and that will be really exciting

source

This quote has me reflecting on the diversity of software, especially in the realm of open source social media platforms. It seems like many of them are just clones of popular ones, lacking true innovation. Why is this the case? Are there any open source social media platforms that are genuinely innovative and offer something unique?

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

social media platforms seem so similar to each other, because they all implement the same mathematical constructs.

there's users, and there's topics, as the fundamental way to organize your platform.

  • if you focus on users, you end up with something like Xitter or Mastodon where you can follow user accounts.
  • if you follow topics, you either end up with hashtags, or you end up with communities like on lemmy/reddit which focus on one topic each.

There's not a lot of fundamental ways i see that you could change that. If you can think of one, name it.

You could always augment your platform with nice tools, such as image upload, image conversion, link preview, AI tools, and such, but it's just addons around the same basic structure.

[–] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 50 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If it’s too unique, no one will adopt it. You gotta start with a formula people actually know how to use and then try to come up with something new and novel that’s actually useful and people like. Otherwise you just end up with https://youtu.be/fV2AprdWKk0

[–] hypna@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

A counterpoint would be to ask which platforms digg and reddit began as clones of. Seems they were pretty unique and yet exploded almost from the beginning. Snapchat? Vine? They were both pretty unique.

To OPs point, basically all of the fediverse apps are clones, which aside from the federation element, don't add anything to the formula they are cloning. Even if you prefer the incremental strategy, where things are basically the same with a few new features, it would be hard to argue the fediverse apps even meet that bar. To the average user, federation is a technical issue they'd rather not be bothered with.

So I'm inclined to agree that this first wave of open source, federated social platforms have ended up, in terms of social features, pretty uninnovative. But before I sound too critical, I appreciate the work these app builders have put in, and clearly use the apps myself.

It may be a question of project scope. If what you aim to do is liberate yourself and your fellow nerds from corporate platforms, the clones suffice. If, perhaps, your aim is to liberate everyone, you'll need innovation in both the backend, and the social features to draw in everyone else.

Caveat - I've only really used Mastodon and Lemmy. Perhaps others are different.

[–] madbob@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

Actually, social media work the opposite: each has to offer a unique social "challenge" to become popular. In X, you have to write an interesting post with hard constraints in length. In Instagram, you have to publish beautiful photos. In TikTok, you have to publish funny short videos.

Until now, open source has provided innovative technical solutions but zero innovation in term of "social interaction".

[–] Murazaki@lemmy.balamb.fr 4 points 1 day ago

You are coming with a consumer driven way of identifying innovation. This is not it. Innovation comes when you try solving problems. It's not a shiny product. What you're looking for is marketability.

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

Can you actually explain what is the same, please? Don't just say "text and pictures and hyperlinks". Please have something more precise than that. Please.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago

You can describe all social media as people posting stuff then other people subscribing to see that stuff either by person, by topic or indirectly by what other stuff you do (via recommendation algorithms) and commenting or voting on it.

If something doesn't meet that description it's not really social media.

Given that, there's only really a finite number of ways you can display content with votes and comments.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Most social media that got popular took something that people were already doing and brought it to a wider audience. Here are some examples:

Myspace

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was common for people, especially teenagers to make personal sites introducing themselves and linking to a few of their friends. Sometimes they would add life updates to the sites, but often linked to a blog hosted elsewhere (e.g. Livejournal). Myspace just institutionalized that.

Facebook

At first, it was pretty much Myspace for adults, then it integrated something a lot like an internal RSS reader.

Flickr

As digital cameras became popular, people started putting photo albums on their personal sites. Flickr made it easy.

Twitter

A blog and feed reader combination you could post to by SMS at a time when most phones didn't have internet.

Instagram

Image-focused Twitter designed to be used from a smartphone.

Reddit

A then-popular social bookmarking site called Delicious had a "popular" section for links many people bookmarked. Instead of people having to find the links independently, Reddit added vote arrows. Eventually they added comments and it became a forum, which is also a thing people were doing already.

Youtube

This is the exception. Hosting videos was ridiculously expensive in 2005 so people weren't doing it much. Youtube set VC money on fire until Google bought it and set Google money on fire for a decade or so until it finally started to be profitable.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

reddit goes way back. reddit, digg, slashdot. Its basically newsgroups which were part of the four basic things of the pre www internet. email, chat, newsgroups, and gopher for search.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

That's true, but for the first few months, Reddit was not like Usenet, mailing lists, or message boards at all. There were no text-only posts (and certainly no image or video posts), nor were there comments. It was purely designed to share links to other websites.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 13 points 2 days ago

There's only so many different ways you can accomplish "people can post things for other people to see and respond to".

[–] _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

At the end of the day, it's all just more or less forums and chat.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 8 points 2 days ago

There are new ones being made, they just don't have as easy of a time catching on as an alternative to a popular thing that already caught on. It is a lot easier to get traction when people are familiar with the concept.

It is like how tons of songs and movies and art gets made, but the popular stuff tends to lead to similar stuff also becoming popular.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What? The fediverse is the only place you will find a variety of social media implementations all cooperating while also innovating in unique ways. There are dozens of different projects on the network, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There's nothing else that compares to it when it comes to diversity of software.

For example, it may interest you to learn that I am not using lemmy right now.

[–] Davy_Jones@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

How is the fediverse software innovating? Lemmy feels just like Reddit and Mastodon seems like Twitter but it doesn't have algorithms so in practice it feels more like a chat.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Saying that lemmy is just a copy of reddit is like saying that reddit is just a copy of Usenet. There are fundamental differences, but they have some obvious things in common. Even if mastodon is just twitter to you, then what exactly do you think misskey is? I'm posting from mbin here which is not quite like anything else.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean mbin is just Reddit + Twitter

[–] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sure, sure, and Facebook is just Geocities + phpBB + surveillance capitalism. Nothing is new since 1995.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Facebook is not at all comparable to Geocities, displays the contents of every thread of a "section", and then invented Social Media by adding Feeds. Even disregarding the lattes, I don't see how Mbin is at all comparable.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"invented Social Media" — bwahahahaha. You can't actually be serious? I was a social media addict since 1989.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No, you're probably thinking of Social Networks. I'm talking about an algorithmically-filtered homepage of recent updates anywhere, creating your filter bubble.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Your odd capitalized notion of "Social Networks" seems like a typical LLM hallucination, but on the chance that you're human and came up with it yourself, I suggest starting by reading up on the history of Usenet in enough detail that you understand how Kibo would be relevant to that statement.

That's not to say that Facebook didn't do anything novel. Their algorithms for matching up advertisers with their targets are well beyond what we had in the old days.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I capitalize for comparison (to Social Media) and have my humanity doubted >:((((

I suggest you watch Tantacrul's video on Facebook for what made it a social network and social media service respectively—the latter, centralized feeds, which from a skim of his Wikipedia article I don't see what Kibo has anything to do with.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well, you're using "Social Media" as some kind of proper noun which apparently means something other than what most of humanity means by social media, hence my doubt. Sorry I was slow to understand. "Social network" on the other hand usually refers to networks of social connections in general, mediated or not.

My social media feed in 1989 was pretty good. Kibo was a guy who was famous for a thing that demonstrated to everyone the power that Usenet users had to generate their own views of the network according to whatever algorithms they chose. More often we had what I suppose you'd call a more reddit-like experience. Although I guess it's so far unclear if your personal definition of Social Media would include Reddit.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

technically it's not part of any definition of "social media", but it's so ubiquitous that pretty much every well-known social media platform has it. this thing is a recommendation algorithm that acts on its own filters and aggregates items onto a homepage; usenet only had "filtering" by rooms. and yes, this definition would include reddit with its algorithm. i'm still unfortunately unable to find what you're referring to that would be such an algorithm.

though since the beginning this has been a bit of a tangent—i mentioned disregarding that part of facebook's innovations since it would be an unfair comparison. what did you mean when you said i was, well to put it a much harsher way than what you actually said but in the only way i can succintly summarize it after putting down this overly long disclaimer, dismissive of innovations?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You opened with "I mean mbin is just Reddit + Twitter" which is just ridiculous. However important the precise nature of the algorithms used to generate users' feeds might be (mine shows only things I follow and is sorted by "new" most of the time), such qualities as being decentralized, standards-based, openly interoperable, and advertising-free are more so.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was arguing against "Mbin is not quite like anything else". assuming Lemmy is a copy of Reddit, Mbin is a copy of (Reddit + Twitter). to be more precise I can also say it's just Lemmy + Mastodon.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, that first assumption is where you went wrong.

[–] Little8Lost@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

but there is not only lemmy and mastodon
here you can find probably all relevant ones: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 points 2 days ago

They're all just ways of facilitating various forms of communication between people. Until we invent new ways of communication, new forms of media, etc, what could social media possibly innovate?

[–] sadfitzy@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 days ago

What needs to be innovated on?

I'd say have a standard that everyone can use should be the goal. If people want to customize their own setups, that's on them.

[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago

It's cheaper to just copy what someone else has done, provided they make it easy to copy it.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

The social media that exist today do so because of pretty extreme evolutionary pressure in competition with many other similar and dissimilar platforms.

The core premise formula of these corpo social medias is often not actually bad in a vacuum.

If you think about legacy social media:

Facebook is about sharing and following microblogs from your friends and acquaintances and staying in touch. YouTube is about sharing videos. Tumblr is about niche interest full-fat blogs. Reddit is about making it easy to create a forums.

MySpace is for uhm uhh something like Facebook and Tumblr mixed together, which just doesn't hold the appeal because those crowds are almost completely separate. IMO it actually works well, but VK (back in the day) did it better IYKYK.

Then your second gen ones:

Instagram is about sharing photos. Twitter is for news commentary and opinion microblogs. Google+ is uhhh like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in one.

Ofc you also have Vine which just failed to monetize but was actually a good concept that people loved.

Then you have your third gen ones like:

Snapchat is like Instagram but for messages. TikTok is like YouTube but short and for phones.

YikYak is like Facebook but uhhh.

You can even trace it back to wacky dot-com bubble ideas with some sort of funnyshoesfordogs.com that has a gimmick but no longevity and then the more refined but rough sites of the mid-aughts competing with each other for new users and for early adopters against the then dominant petty dictatorships of various forums.

So copying existing platforms is not a bad idea to start with. Perhaps out of this we can see a new demand and meet it with a federated structure to get ahead of the corpos as well.

[–] WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 0 points 2 days ago

Research the CIA's plan on data mining.

[–] INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 0 points 2 days ago

Truth social lol