A tech trade veteran, Mike McCue sees a gap for a unique sort of web the place algorithms don’t name the pictures. Mr. McCue, the chief government of the web firm Flipboard, is difficult social media’s automated grip on our consideration, betting that people, not machines, ought to curate on-line experiences.

Three many years in the past, as vice chairman of know-how on the groundbreaking tech firm Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize info entry via the World Broad Internet. Now, he’s positioning his firm’s new Surf browser as a part of a rising neighborhood of so-called decentralized social media choices, alongside rising platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.

The timing might be fortuitous, as on-line publishers wrestle with an outdated downside and a brand new menace. For years, they’ve frightened that the web’s middlemen — big platforms like Fb and TikTok — have weakened their ties with the individuals who learn or view their materials. Now publishers face one other challenge: New A.I. methods that would utterly eradicate these fraying hyperlinks with their audiences.

Surf provides a window right into a quiet know-how motion echoing the early days of the World Broad Internet. With the help of a number of web technical requirements which are supposed to encourage the expansion of a brand new sort of social media, Mr. McCue has created a possible path the place media corporations can construct direct relationships with readers.

In distinction to the present social net, which is dominated by a number of massive know-how corporations, the brand new software program protocols could appear a bit wonky for now. However they make it doable for web customers to speak and share info with out counting on a single centralized service.

One of many new technical requirements is called ActivityPub. Social media platforms utilizing the protocol can discuss to at least one one other, permitting customers on completely different networks to work together seamlessly — much like how e mail works throughout completely different suppliers.

ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Broad Internet Consortium, a know-how standards-making group. The usual initially drew scant curiosity. However Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now generally known as X, in 2022 has created an exodus of customers and publishers searching for alternate options.

Surf permits cellphone, pill and private laptop customers to curate feeds from a wide range of sources right into a single dashboard-like view. It’s going to additionally permit them to publish personally curated collections of data.

Surf remains to be being privately examined by Mr. McCue’s small firm, which plans to supply this system freely later this 12 months. But whereas the open social motion remains to be small, it has gained consideration each time there’s a disruptive occasion resembling Mr. Musk’s buy of Twitter.

Decentralized social media gained vital momentum in 2023 when Meta adopted the ActivityPub customary for its X competitor, Threads, and later introduced plans to attach with different ActivityPub-based companies. What Mr. McCue calls the “open social net” already has greater than 300 million contributors, he estimated, and the majority of them at the moment are Meta’s Threads customers.

The shared aim of main customers out of silos accelerated with the latest success of Bluesky, which the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched in 2023. Though it’s constructed on a rival customary generally known as the AT Protocol, a bridge has already been constructed between the 2 protocols to make it doable for customers of the social media companies to attach.

“Everybody has simply been copying one another’s options in walled gardens, however now innovation will grow to be decentralized round human connection,” Mr. McCue mentioned in an interview.

Mr. McCue, 56, co-founded Flipboard as a digital information aggregator in 2010. He has made a profession of being early to use modifications in web applied sciences. He began Paper Software program to make it doable to visually show 3-D info in net browsers after which offered the corporate to Netscape for $20 million in 1996.

In 1999 he co-founded Tellme Networks, a pioneering effort to create what had been described as a “voice browser” and make it doable to obtain web info through the cellphone. That firm was offered to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.

Some of the vital potentials of the open social net is that it’ll allow corporations to step away from invasive promoting, Mr. McCue mentioned. He describes the choice as “contextual” promoting to explicit pursuits fairly than people. For instance, advertisements will be posted to net feeds targeted on matters resembling backpacking or trend.

“The notion of making an viewers fairly than chasing site visitors is one thing we now have been exploring,” mentioned Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a well-liked information and media web site. “ActivityPub may facilitate that by permitting for extra direct and significant engagement with our readers.”

Along with Meta’s resolution to base Threads on ActivityPub, information organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the know-how, as have running a blog platforms resembling Medium, WordPress and Ghost.

ActivityPub has additionally led to a wave of start-up efforts resembling Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has greater than 14 million accounts related by a community of over 14,000 host computer systems, in addition to start-ups like Pixelfed and PeerTube, distributed companies that provide options much like Instagram and YouTube.

For a number of many years, Google’s dominance of web search has been the driving drive behind content material creation and distribution. However as Google has invested in generative-A.I. summarization for responses to customers’ queries, a window of alternative for all types of discovery instruments along with chatbots has made the necessity for alternate options extra pressing.

That could be a far cry from the very early roots of the World Broad Internet within the work of Theodor H. Nelson, who, whereas a Harvard graduate pupil in 1961, observed that textual content on the primary laptop screens may transfer and that writing not wanted to be linear. He invented the idea of hypertext, which was later adopted because the underlying construction of the World Broad Internet. The designers of the brand new open social net companies imagine that their different is a step again towards the web’s authentic beliefs.

“It goes again to the unique ideas the place the web began out as decentralized,” mentioned Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social networking platform that permits customers to affix independently operated servers whereas staying related via a worldwide community.

The transition from centralized to decentralized fashions would require a cultural shift amongst each publishers and audiences.

“There are vital product questions to resolve, resembling how one can deal with moderation and content material discovery in a decentralized surroundings,” mentioned Mike Godwin, a lawyer identified for his work on web rights and digital tradition. “However these are the varieties of latest issues we needs to be dealing with, ones that include real innovation.”

Regardless of these challenges, the keenness among the many early adopters reminds some web pioneers of the primary few years of the World Broad Internet.

“The vitality round ActivityPub jogs my memory of the early days of the Internet,” Mr. Nelson mentioned in a latest interview, “the place something appeared doable, and innovation was round each nook.”