Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
What a great question...
  

    
I actually was wondering the same and I have a question for Well
users. Is there ever any talk about longevity here - of recruiting a
new generation of users? Or perhaps such a process is underway. I am
curious about that. The Well has obviously figured something out
about retaining utility for a community through shifting times, and
part of that success may be resisting the "innovations" proposed by
profit-driven platforms that end up serving no one but the platforms
themselves. I think a lot of people wish that Instagram and Facebook
had retained their original features rather than continuously
changing. 

Does every generation need their own space, or can one created by
one generation, like this one, be adopted and put to use by a
successive generation? 

Some people I've spoken to have proposed that social media in the
future should be regulated like a public utility, and paid for as
such, via subscriptions, so there would be no ads. This seems like a
common-sense plan but also an unlikely one. 

Anyway, I too am curious to hear anyone's thoughts. And thanks again
for having me, I've really enjoyed the opportunity to check out the
different spaces here, and observe how this community works.
  

    
There've definitely been conversations about attracting a new
generation of users. Inkwell exists in part as a kind of
demonstration of what we do here, hoping users reading these
discussions will be interested in joining.

In the 90s we were one of a very few platforms for this kind of
interaction, so we had a lot more users. Many drifted away, probably
in part because other platforms appeared, even though those don't
offer the same sense of community. 

New users who show up should know to observe and get a sense of the
place before jumping into conversations. It's definitely a
community, with customs and norms, though not too many, not too
daunting. 

I'm a little surprised more people aren't showing up here and
rejecting drive-by social media. I'd much rather be in an ongoing
linear conversation here, going deeper, than throwing my thoughts
into the mix at Facebook or Bluesky or Mastodon. Though I post at
all of the above, I spend most of my online-interaction time here.
  

    
There have been multi-generational efforts here.  The GenX
conference back in the late nineties was in someways a
counter-cultural force to the boomers and deadheads who were some of
the Well's original members. There were younger folks in greater
numbers in the early 2000s too. 
Sadly, we haven't done a great job in prying Gen Z out of their
platforms either. 

I do think that a counter-punching strategy is worthwhile here, if
we were serious about growing.   We have more in common with Reddit
than Facebook and I think we're more Tumblr than Snapchat.  The lack
of visual posting (maybe due to our ascii and terminal-based roots)
has always felt like a big barrier to me but I think I'm an outlier
there in this culture. There is a lot of resistance to change still
here.

I'm a big fan of New_ Public's work and their goals for making
social media that doesnt suck and doesn't exploit its community.

I'm watching what they are doing in Chicago with their community
platform Roundabout
https://newpublic.org/chicago
  

    
This was also a great article about what could come next and the
importance of local social outlets, digital and otherwise

https://archive.is/gOSlw
  

    
Thank you, Kathryn, for this great conversation. I love your
questions about the longevity of the WELL and the (relative)
stability of its features. It's a good reminder that the big
platforms like Facebook have never been stable. The sheer amount of
auto-play video on today's social media would have been quite
striking to me even ten years ago.