Ello blew up this week. It’s new and shiny and does some interesting things. That being said, it’s not where social networking or how we use the Internet needs to go.

If you want more reading:

• Andy on VC funding
• Aral Balkan on Sustainability/Economic logic of VC funding
• Quinn on Social Networks
• Anselm on decentralization and protocols

I had posted some of my own initial thoughts, which is that the ideal social network should be end-user controlled and distributed and decentralized. A natural pre-condition is there should be an open protocol, but it’d be worth fleshing out the type of functionality that’s required (I’ll have to revisit some relevant thinking I did in the early 2000s in decentralized SNSs, the mid-2000s on permeability/privacy, and the late-2000s on Y!OS).

FWIW, the more interesting social networking-related project I discovered is an open source, decentralized, massively-distributed 3D simulation engine called Lucidscape. It is explicitly designed for an open metaverse. (See also: Open Cobalt née Croquet)