A new tool launched last month that may change the very foundation of how we think about social media.

There has been an aggressive push in recent years to create something called decentralized social media, but until now it has been hard to imagine what exactly that might look like at scale.

Today, this thing we call “social media” happens on closed platforms. We sign in to Facebook to get Facebook content, TikTok for TikTok content, etc., but it wasn’t always that way – in fact, there was a time when it could have gone in the opposite direction.

Remember AOL?

To wrap our minds around what that closed ecosystem means, let’s look at the internet. Anyone can access any website at any time now, but in the early days of the web, if you wanted to get online you had to do it through a service provider like AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy.

Once you logged on, you’d get access to web pages, message boards, and other content that was all hosted by that specific company. There was no way to use Prodigy to read an article on AOL, for example.

Until one day we were introduced to this novel concept called the web browser. By downloading Netscape or Internet Explorer, you could type in any URL you liked and that website would pop up (or slowly load) onto your screen. Then, of course, search engines helped us to access even more of the web by making it searchable.

Social started open, then Facebook happened

Social media had exactly the opposite journey. It could be argued that the original source of social content was a service called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It was a bit of script that anyone could put onto a web page that would pull in blogs and other content that anyone was posting online. Creative people developed services that would curate different types of “open” content, and made it possible to interact with it.

That was until MySpace, Friendster, and eventually Twitter and Facebook saw an opportunity to simplify the process by creating platforms that served their content to logged in users. As venture capital poured into the space, the open social platforms were unable to compete and we ended up where we are today.

The shift back to Open Social is already happening

All of that may now be changing. Over the past few years, new types of social platforms have popped up that are open, meaning that profiles and posts are as freely accessible as a web page, and users can access the content whether or not they are members of that particular service.

These platforms — including Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr — each have millions of daily active users. The big news that flew mostly under the radar was when Threads was launched by Meta as an open, decentralized social platform.

Despite all of that progress, it hasn’t caused any big changes because there hasn’t been an easy way for us as users to interact with content across the different platforms.

That’s why the recent launch of a service called Openvibe is such a big deal. Openvibe makes it easy for anyone to create and curate their own newsfeed, bringing together content from any open platform all into a single user experience. This could be the web browser moment for social media.

Why would anyone continue to be captive to a single platform if they could see anything they want from any channel in one place?

Where are we now?

There’s still a lot of work to be done, because while Meta has opened up Threads, it has kept Instagram and Facebook closed, and the same goes for TikTok and YouTube.

The same could have been said, however, for AOL and CompuServe. All of us were used to our provider-based access, and those businesses had huge piles of money, so the idea of a fully open web seemed ridiculous. And yet, here we are. Most people reading this won’t even remember those companies and find it hard to imagine an internet that would have ever been closed off.

We’re already seeing demand for cross-platform sharing. Pinterest has added a feature to share boards on Instagram, and many of the most popular Reels were originally shared on TikTok.

If you’re someone who wants to stay ahead of the next big shift, now would be a great time to start looking into the implications of open social media, and consider what it could mean for your own content strategies. I’ll offer a few thought starters to consider:

  1. If follower counts are no longer restricted to platforms, then the most popular accounts will simply be the ones who create the best content, not the ones that play the algorithm game
  2. If anyone can curate their own experiences, then the entire social media landscape could look a lot more like Reddit, with super active communities of people with shared interests
  3. The big companies likely aren’t going anywhere, but their value will no longer be limited to the number of people on their platforms, so they’ll need to get really good at providing services and subscriptions

One last thought

Even if I’m right, and we do see a dramatic shift to a social media landscape that is as open as the internet at large, it’s unlikely that the first services to enable that shift will be the eventual winners. (Remember that the first web browsers included NetScape, Internet Explorer, and NetSurf).

So, as you’re exploring Openvibe and the inevitable competitors that follow, it’s safe to assume that these are only the start, and that the services that we use in the future will likely look much different than the ones today.

So as you explore Openvibe and its inevitable future competitors, it’s safe to assume that these are just the beginning, and it’s likely that future services will look very different from what we use today.

Read more about Openvibe on TechCrunch