The Ephemeral Age

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Nov 06, 2024

The history of social media isn't just a story of innovation—it's a story of enclosure. Facebook's journey from open platform to walled garden set the blueprint: use openness to achieve scale, then bolt the door shut. Today's landscape is a hostage situation—our memories are trapped on Facebook, our connections are locked in Instagram, and X's social graph is hidden behind a $42,000/mo paywall.

Meanwhile, we're entering a new era where an open social graph is not just a plus – it's absolutely critical to taking full advantage of the tools at our disposal. The next wave of social won't be built by giants, but by millions of creators armed with AI. The boundary between apps and content is dissolving. Every meme could become an interactive experience, every community could spawn its own custom tools, and every event could have its own temporary economy.

The AI-Powered Creative Explosion

Apps are about to become as easy to create as TikTok videos. The signals are already here: Replit's Agent writes entire applications from a simple prompt, Cursor generates complex features in seconds, and Suno lets anyone create AI music instantly. AI is collapsing the app creation timeline from months to minutes. Soon, anyone will be able to describe an app idea to an AI and have it materialized instantly. Want to create a custom game for your friend group? A specialized dating app for your niche community? A temporary social network for your event? All of this becomes possible at the speed of thought.

This isn't just about quantity—it's about radical specificity. Instead of mass-market platforms trying to serve everyone, we'll see millions of hyper-specialized experiences. Think of Discord servers spawning their own AI-powered minigames, or subreddits automatically generating interactive visualization tools for their communities.

These apps will come and go as quickly as content does today. The feed will optimize for "new," and while the experience might change, the people you're experiencing it with shouldn't. The future of social will be ephemeral by design.

Imagine a Midjourney-generated image inspiring a temporary virtual gallery where friends can create and curate AI art together. Or a viral tweet spawning an instant multiplayer game that riffs on its humor. These experiences might last hours or days, but their impact on relationships and communities persists. A weekend festival might spawn dozens of specialized apps — matchmaking for nearby fans, real-time crowd heatmaps, collaborative playlists powered by Suno — that enhance the experience, then vanish when the music stops.

The emergence of AI agents on platforms like Farcaster points to an even more intriguing future. These autonomous agents already create content, trade tokens, and engage directly with humans in social spaces. Soon, every ephemeral app could have its own AI participants, enriching interactions and creating dynamic environments that evolve even when their human users are offline. We might even consider agents themselves a new form of entertainment.

Missing Foundations

But this creative explosion faces a critical barrier: without shared social infrastructure, we're heading for the great fragmentation of human relationships across digital spaces. Every time a user joins a new app, they must rebuild their social connections from scratch. This friction becomes unbearable in a world of millions of ephemeral apps and autonomous AI agents.

Today, blockchains claim to solve this problem since all data is open and can be used by anyone. This, however, ignores the fact that just because data is available doesn't mean it is meaningful by default or easy to use. Blockchains have implicit social graphs, but they lack explicit ones that specifically outline profiles, relationships, identities, etc.

The solution lies in permanent social infrastructure supporting infinite ephemeral expressions. This is what we're building at Tapestry. By storing structured social data directly on Solana, relationships remain permanent even as applications become temporary. Your identity, connections, and reputation follow you seamlessly across every new experience.