@jrf
tldr: @marqui and the history of *social*
*social* has never been a stable product category.
it keeps reinventing itself on top of the same primitive: a person, a website, and the ability to read and write on the internet.
the early web had it, too.
blogs weren’t just posts. they had authors, commenters, profile blurbs, and little communities stitched together by hyperlinks. every blog was a protosocial network.
then facebook arrived and formalized the pattern:
a structured profile, interests, privacy settings, a wall where other people could write on your page. the news feed simply inverted that: instead of visiting everyone else’s page, all the updates came to you.
twitter and reddit changed where *social* happens.
reddit said: it’s about topics, not people.
twitter said: it’s about the public square.
both felt social in the way a park or marketplace does: you can meet people, but the magic is the free association.
fast-forward and everything sort of converged on the same abstraction: a user’s “website,” with structured text, links, identity, and read/write surfaces for themselves and others.
the form factor is stable because it’s familiar. if you drift too far from it, users get confused. but if you stay too close, you inherit all the limitations of incumbents: the noise, the feeds, the lack of structure, the absence of intention.
imo, the goal now shouldn't be to invent a new “social network.”
it’s to return to the primitive, the personal website, and make it finally smart, connected, and programmable.
that’s where @marqui lives.
social, but oriented around you, not the feed.
and powered by agents that can bring the world in selectively, not indiscriminately through feeds.
thanks for reading, would love to hear thoughts as we navigate the @marqui mind maze!