2025-10-11 • social-media, ai, IndieWeb, website
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**The Weave**
For a few days, I noticed these weird surveillance camera videos appearing in my Instagram feed — which I sometimes scroll through despite knowing better. Among a bunch of cat videos, I started to suspect they weren’t real but AI-generated.
Then I remembered that OpenAI just released Sora 2, their attempt to become an all-in-one video platform and social network for AI-generated content. Some techno-edge lords claim that OpenAI has made any existing tech stack obsolete, predicting that AI will soon create everything—from Spotify playlists with AI-generated music to endless other innovations.
I don’t follow all this too closely, but I’m open to AI and curious about where this all might lead.
So, I prompted my brain to imagine what the future could hold:
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**The Future of Social Media**
From my perspective, and that of others I know, what’s coming is a mass abandonment of commercial social media. People will reject its restrictions, its demented influencers peddling garbage, its AI-generated noise, and its inflammatory, cortisol-inducing shock content.
What will finally break people’s brains — extrapolating from my own experience — is the growing decision fatigue. We now have to figure out whether a funny cat video is real or the product of some deranged creator who generates grotesque AI content: imagine a cat taking a dump into foamy, rose-petal-decorated bathwater while its artificial owner freaks out.
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**AI: Friend and Foe**
I’m not opposed to AI; in some cases, it has helped me tremendously. But there’s mounting evidence that it also prevents people from getting things done. People grow tired of the fata morganas that AI creates — mirages of work supposedly completed.
Look closer, and it’s nothing but an anamorphic sculpture[1], an illusion that looks great from one angle but, from any other, turns out to be just a pile of garbage.
Because of this, the human touch will become increasingly important—and more expensive. Artisanal quality time.
Professional writers and programmers will find themselves busier than ever. Their job will be to restore the human touch to AI-generated word salad or to make vibe-coded software secure and efficient.
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**What Will Replace Social Networks?**
I have no clear idea what will replace today’s social networks. What’s certain is that the landscape will be more fragmented.
We will see smaller, perhaps even non-public platforms—maybe people will just meet at a bar again—or intranets.
This shift might lead to a revival of two principles established by the IndieWeb movement:
– **POSSE** (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
– **PESOS** (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site)
The idea is simple: make your own website the single source of truth.
Post there first and share links to whatever web service is currently hyped. Or post on those platforms but pull the content back into your own site.
Both approaches have caveats.
POSSE must deal with web services that downrank external links. PESOS faces limited programmatic API access (for instance, fetching an Instagram or LinkedIn post often costs money).
But in any case, it’s worth trying to keep control over the things you create—be it commercial, professional, or private content.
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[1] Anamorphic sculpture: a form of art that appears distorted except from a particular vantage point.
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*The Weave will come together at the end.*
https://marcus-obst.de/blog/websites-are-for-humans