My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions
timothychambers.nethttps://www.timothychambers.net/2024/12/24/predictions-for-t... It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr) Hasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though. IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations. How does bluesky have no shareable content? My friends who twittered now all use BS. Haven’t noticed a change in “check this out” Point to publically posted bs links or embeds please then. Not F2F shares. That's what I am talking about. X and FB have those in droves and they are a real growth driver. Not embeds or links, but tons of skeet screenshots on Reddit, daily. ubiquitous. Not remotely as common as xeets, but the platform is way less common so that checks out. And the overwhelming majority of Xitter content that breaks out of platform are just screenshots as well and not direct links/embeds. Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances. That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff. What would be driving that trend? I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services. I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work. The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment. On that note there's also https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers). With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those. I really like this atproto model so much. Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone. You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything. People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs. That said, I did try to get some of my git repos on https://Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app https://bookhive.buzz or the annotation service https://seams.so , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need. Tangled was a surprising contrast, but I hope to be online there sometime soon-ish! I totally agree! This is actually a very good summary of the value prop for atproto honestly. Definitely saving this. ("credible edit" -> "credible exit" I'm assuming.) It certainly took a while for me to grasp how all the different components in the atproto stack function and work together, but the decoupling actually makes so much sense and I've also become a huge fan of it for all of the reasons you mention. It really feels like a natural extension of Web 2.0 to me. Re: Tangled Tangled does actually host a default knot server at https://knot1.tangled.sh. You should be able to select it when you create a repo? But yes Tangled's component infrastructure is kind of unique. Only the social data (issues, PRs, comments, stars, follows, etc.) is stored in your data repository on your PDS. The git server requires a separate "knot" server. It's described a bit more in-depth here[1]. As far as I understand it's basically just the git repo hosting part of Tangled's AppView, split off into its own thing to make it possible to self-host it. This means you stay in control of your repo data but also get the benefits of having an actual server with a remote git repo as the authoritative source for the purpose of collaboration, which is what people are generally used to when collaborating using git. You're probably correct in that the "normal" way would be to have the Tangled AppView act as the git server, but have it store the remote git repo on your PDS. But as records in your PDS data repository are either JSON documents or unstructured blobs I guess it's kind of hard to use that for a git repo, which is largely filesystem dependent. I imagine it would require some kind of translation layer. Or something like git-bundle[2] maybe? git-ssb was (now is again, really) one of those areas where ssb was vastly superior to atproto since all peers hosted the repos Social movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off. When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales. People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance. (w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.) > I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way. Yeah, now that github requires 2FA, which means I frequently have to do the phone dance, I'm always wary of clicking a github.com link. I really doubt that. People have been hating on GitHub for years or even decades. GitLab at some point very publicly wanted to become "the world's most trusted place for open source software" but I think they gave up, or at least pivoted to AI. GitHub has one massive advantage which is even people in HR know programmers use it, and they can just glance at a candidate from GitHub. For as long as this remains in place, GitHub will survive. I would rather use GitLab, honestly. Forgejo, Codeberg, etc, have a CI/CD modelled after GitHub actions which I really don't like, but I digress. Once there's some universal identity/Single Sign On for these self-hosted platforms, this might become more likely. I need to out nostr logins for Gitea: https://git.mleku.dev/mleku/gitea-nostr-auth I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications. Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time Social media compromises - asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter” Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on. You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life. I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared Something that the social media industry will try hard to stop: users placing an AI agent between themselves and their social media accounts. Smarter clients that front-end a large number of social media services may be the answer to the hassles of federation. If somebody works this right, Facebook/X/Instagram could be Left Behind. The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended. Beeper already does this where possible. "the social media industry will try hard to stop" lmao. I think you've misspelled "will actively encourage" When it is their own AI, encourage; anyone else's, prevent. How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads". > Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features. That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months. As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service. i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere. i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky. bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom." Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive. It's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there. At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that. Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others. I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice. Why not several identities, and aggregation in the client? You seem to need to be in the community to fully interact with it on Mastodon, anyway. The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership. So did forums, even with no federation. You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky. Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation. Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate. Having many instances is not the same as federation. Isn't one a subset of the other? A system with federation must have multiple instances, but a system with multiple instances doesn't need to federate (in the sense of information passing between independently managed instances.) Yes. My original question was whether federation is necessary for the kind of communities Mastodon serves, not whether the web must have multiple websites. Some of the worst of the pile-on, scolding, pearl clutching behaviors that made everyone very glad to see certain people leave other platforms make large swathes of bsky totally worthless. It's like a mashup of the worst parts of reddit and twitter. There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people." The experience you describe has been completely different from mine. I’m not a big poster, but I use Bluesky daily for: - Sports - Law - Authors - Comedy - Video Games - Programming news - Other general news Really feels like you are projecting a bit. > As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore. > There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore. There's something beautiful about a defense of a community that is also a perfect exemplar of that community. Bit fractal, init? I personally find it less toxic than Xitter and that’s good. Less drama, lots of politics - which is probably normal at the moment but kind of annoying. Certain bubbles like gamedev are big. I think bsky is here to stay. Spot on observation. The very class of interaction indeed. What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates. I use Bluesky to keep up with software development news. The ability to default to my "following" feed is a big plus. I mostly see software related stuff and the stream of posts is slow enough that I reduced my time spent on the app. Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming. > The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws. > Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale. Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol. > We’re launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026] I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true. Looks like they are ready to scoop up a bunch of EU grant money, perhaps at fediverse's cost. Esp. since it looks (not sure) that an AI company is behind the initiative: https://themodalfoundation.org/ Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there. Steady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers. I predict 2026 will see a mass return to self-hosted blogging (and the Linux desktop, natch). This is my hope as well, but fear of ai scrape is real among folks I have chatted with this about. If you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? How’s that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites? If you don’t want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication. The problem is that LLM “summaries” do not cite sources. They furthermore don’t distinguish between making summaries and taking direct quotes; that “summary” is often directly lifting text that someone wrote. LLMs don’t cite in either case. It’s a clear case of plagiarism, but tech companies are being allowed to get away with it. Publishing in a paid publication is not a solution because tech companies are scraping those too. It’s absolutely criminal. As an individual, I would be in clear violation of the law if I took text someone else wrote (even if that text was in the public domain) and presented it as my own without attribution. From an academic perspective, LLM summaries also undermine the purpose of having clear and direct attribution for ideas. Citing sources not only makes clear who said what; it also allows the reader to know who is responsible for faulty knowledge. I’ve already seen this in my line of work, where LLMs have significantly boosted incorrect data. The average reader doesn’t know this data is incorrect and in fact can’t verify any of the data because there is no attribution. This could have serious consequences in areas like medicine. Its important to consider others perspectives, even if inaccurate. As it was expressed to me when I suggested "why not write a blog" to a relative who is into niche bug photos and collecting they didn't want to give their writing and especially photos to be trained on. They have valid points honestly and an accurate framing of what will happen, it will get injested eventually likely. I think they overestimate a tad their works importance overall but still they seemed to have a pretty accurate guage of likely outcomes. Let me flip the question, why should they not be able to choose "not for training uses" even if they put it up publically? > why should they not be able to choose "not for training uses" even if they put it up publically? I'm having trouble even parsing that question; "Publically" means that you put yourself out there, no? It sounds to me like that Barbra Streisand thing of building an ostentatious mansion and expecting no one to post photos of it. I suppose you could try to publish things behind some sort of EULA, but that's expressly not public. If you are having trouble understanding, just ask. Of course I'm talking about a websites terms of use. As I understand it, terms of use on a publicly accessible page aren't enforceable. That's why it's legal to e.g. scrape pages of news sites regardless of any terms of use. If it's curlable, it's fair game (but it's fair for the site to try to block my scraping). These scrapers can bring a small website to its knees. Also, my "contribution" will be drowned in the mass, making me undiscoverable. Further, I can't help fearing a nightmare where someday I'm accused of using AI when I'm only plagiarizing myself. This is not an answer to your question, but one issue is that if you write about some niche sort of thing (as you do, on a self-hosted blog) that no one else is really writing about, the LLM will take it as a sole source on the topic and serve up its take almost word for word. That's clearly plagiarism, but it's also interesting to me as there's really no way the user who's querying their fav. ai chatbot if the answer has truthiness. I can see a few ways this could be abused. I don't see how this is different from the classic citogenesis process; no AI needed. If a novel claim is of sufficient interest, then someone will end up actually doing proper research and debunking of it, probably having fun and getting some internet fame. > I don't see how this is different from the classic citogenesis process; Lack of novelty doesn't remove it as a problem. Agreed, it's definitely a problem, but I'm just saying that it's the basic problem of "people sometimes say bullshit that other people take at face value". It's not a technical problem. The most relevant approach to analyze this is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-default_theory Fear of AI scrape? I'm just amused at the idea of my words ending up manipulating chatbots to rewrite stuff that I've written, force-feeding it in some distorted form to people silly enough to listen. Why? AI crawlers will kill your server and give no backlinks. At this point, I'm writing for myself and not for any particular audience, b/c even if I'm discovered, I'd be discovered by AI. The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR: 1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution 2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example 3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques The sheer breadth of Nostr's current development is overwhelming at times. I often find myself exclaiming, "What? Nostr can be used like that?"
At present, Nostr appears to be merely a protocol operating within a social media framework. Its capabilities are vast, yet it fundamentally only requires "sending JSON via WebSocket and signing it using the specified algorithm." The only thing worth complaining about might be that there are too many "crypto bros" :D Yeah, true. However they are cool and keep the network alive. Very thankful they are there every single day. What strategy will Nostr use to achieve true P2P social? From what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections. I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies. This is great to hear. The part about Bluetooth/radio/LoRa sounds vaguely like Reticulum. I’ve always thought that the two projects could find alignment somewhere. Nostr with Reticulum style features, or even just Nostr over Reticulum, would be unstoppable. Sorry to say, my opinion is that such alignment will NOT be happening on the foreseeable future unless AI can be used to program whatever is missing on reticulum. Reticulum is poorly implemented on the library side and assumes everything to be encrypted, which is heavy on network links with poor bandwidth. Plus, on radio waves the encryption is not even permitted. NOSTR can be simplified to be less verbose and function on less bandwidth links like bluetooth, LoRa and be unencrypted (just signed messages) to legally use radio waves. Reticulum has some kind of drama against using bluetooth for transmission of data. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to change in the near times. I still have yet to see a BlueSky link in the wild. Check any sports subreddit. I also see them on Discord all the time. Wow, it really is just sports it seems. I do not follow sports so maybe that explains my lack of seeing these links. Big events in sports and politics are what drive growth for most social networks. You can almost map every growth spike after the 2024 election to stuff happening in soccer, football, and baseball. Probably because of the pile on a few months ago about "no X links in my subreddit" because Musk is allegedly a Nazi. Nope. It's been like this for much longer. No, the poster you're replying to is 100% correct; after the Elon "nazi salute" incident, many/most of the sports subreddits banned links to X. Given the nature of sports subreddits, which are frequently just links to breaking news from journalists on social media, Bluesky is used as a mirror for X posts which are allowed to be linked in those subreddits. e.g. just pulling from the front page of your link, [0] and [1] are the same post. The Twitter one is the primary source (posted 25 minutes earlier, 10x the engagement). [0] https://x.com/TomPelissero/status/2003827902388093289 [1] https://bsky.app/profile/tompelissero.bsky.social/post/3maqh... OTOH I feel a bit negative towards companies that stayed on X without at least also having either BlueSky or Mastodon I'm glad the majority of companies aren't active nostr. I don't want even more corporate goo in my timeline and since only a very few companies offer decent social media support in case of issues with their product(s), I'd rather they stick with Bluesky/Mastodon/Threads so I can keep my peace. Got nothing against small shops/makers/artisans that are actively engaging with people and have a real personality. I'm following lots of them myself and purchase their products if shipping costs allow it. I really hope nostr will have sufficient time to develop its own culture before people inevitably notice that freedom of speech is actually important. I guess people will have to burn a couple more accounts on X/B/M/T/FB before seeing the light. Staying on X is just bad, regardless of what else you do. Because access to the internet is inequitably distributed throughout society, it is inherently problematic for any privileged class members (e.g. men, white people) to stay on the internet at all. I suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that it’s presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the ‘Open Social Web’. You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content. Maybe I’m seeing things the wrong way. > You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content. I think this is working pretty great on nostr. You have the WoT to fight cheap spam, spammers/scammers/impersonators get quickly reported and when they show up for you, you'll see who of your followers reported them for which reason. I can still see if I want to check myself. I'm in control, but I don't get bombarded with unfiltered spam. So far nostr has handled spam waves remarkably well. Problematic material (CP, etc) is scrubbed off of most relays/blossoms quickly. Whenever I stumble upon opinions I heavily disagree with, I'm glad that nostr exists. I wasted way too much time in the self censorship safe space hellhole that is Mastodon where too many instance operators think themselves god of their own little pocket universe. If that's you're looking for, more power to you. It just wasn't for me. >> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack — PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure — will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company." Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView. Blacksky's AppView did get a mention in his 2025 predictions review[1], but perhaps it's not exactly considered "self-sustainable" yet? I haven't kept up with it in a while either so I'm also not sure on whether it is or isn't. [1] https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-we... (at the very bottom) As others here below have noticed, there is no match between actual data and predictions made by the authors. Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why? Because people tend to predict the future they wish would happen, not what the data says would be most likely. The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread. My anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. I’d say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isn’t happening. Does anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her? I loved her compilations. can't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen. Norman Cantani? Which language is this written in? English? social web? naw, most normies are just hypnotized on the GPTs now social network, and to some degree open internet, is a millennial thing, it will die out as millennials get older. A poll of gen alpha (aged 12-15) from 2024 asked about job aspirations: Something so grim should be accompanied by its citation, just so we can check it's not a windup I didn't wanna cite the Fortune article I got it from because it cited research from a group called "Whop" that didn't have the full data available. But here's the article I read https://fortune.com/article/gen-alpha-dream-careers-youtuber... EDIT: now that I'm looking more into it, I think this YouGov poll was the original source https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/39997-influence... I do vaguely recall a more serious study showing a vast majority of kids thinking "influencer" was a viable career path and a very large portion beleiving it was the only viable career path for them. It also found that these percentages were higher in boys than in girls. That's the study I was trying to find but failed and found this instead two decades ago it would have been: One interesting difference is influencer is plausible for a significantly larger population of youth than their legacy equivalents ever were This is probably true and I would be really interested to see a longer-running study with a consistent methodology taking this on Consider a prompt like this to a Deep Research agent if you are interested: How have youth career aspirations toward entertainment/fame-oriented careers changed over time (1960s-present), and does the rise of "influencer" represent a genuine shift or category substitution? \"Specific sub-questions\": 1. What longitudinal or repeated cross-sectional surveys have asked children/teens about career aspirations with consistent methodology? 2. What were the historical rates for "actor/entertainer/movie star" type responses in surveys from 1970-2000? 3. How do current "influencer/YouTuber" rates compare when aggregated with traditional entertainment categories? 4. Are there international comparison studies showing different rates by country? 5. Is there evidence for changing perceived accessibility of fame careers (kids thinking it's actually achievable vs. fantasy)? \"Priority sources\": Academic journals (Journal of Career Development, Journal of Vocational Behavior), Gallup historical archives, Pew Research, YouGov archives, OECD education reports, Harris polls historical data. \"Methodological notes\": Flag when studies use different age ranges, different question framings (open-ended vs. multiple choice), and whether "entertainment" categories were offered or emerged organically. I ran this for you and got some really interesting results[0] (TLDR: Young people have traded the stability of the "Company Man" for the autonomy of the "Personal Brand" in response to a labor market that no longer guarantees security. If you asked similar age groups this question in the 1990s you’d get stuff like rock star, actor/actress, and pro athlete. Young kids usually have career aspirations that mirror what’s popular in their media world. It means little. I’d argue those aren’t really because of the social aspects of Youtube or TikTok. Anecdata—as one of the oldest millennials, I have seen a very steep drop off in social network usage amongst my peers. Too much IRL family stuff. We are a major sized user cohort and using social platforms is just not worth the energy is my feeping also. Granted not family tradeoff in ky case, just I don't have free time to waste. A "social network" is a concept that goes far beyond computing and the internet Why? At least currently I don't feel this way about them. I tend to agree — but is there any data on this? Bluesky? Fediverse? Really? please put more work into AI generated content X or Bsky will likely evolve/become replaced by the social network where every tweet is an instant poll, here's a mockup I found: https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20
YouTuber (32%)
TikTok creator (21%)
Doctor/nurse (20%)
Mobile app/video game developer (19%)
Entrepreneur (17%)
Artist (16%)
Sports athlete (15%)
Professional online streamer (15%)
Musician (14%)
Teacher (14%)
Youtube / tiktok are just the equivalent for that age in this day & age. 1. Movie Star / Actor
2. TV Star / entertainer