Path to a Better Internet

We all see it. The inability to put the phone down. The drivers that can’t resist a little TikTok at the intersection.

We all feel it. Thirty minutes of doomscrolling later. Reel-after-reel of the same tired dance memes or pranks.

Regret.

The Empire of Attention

The promise of the Internet, of access and openness, has been broken. Instead of democratization of information, a few dominant walled-gardens control what we see and hear, buying and selling our attention. It’s broken for each of us individually, it’s broken for us collectively, and it’s also broken for content creators. The aim of our algorithmic social media overlords is addiction and attention, not curiosity, cumulative learning, or community. The app formerly known as Twitter – which had prided itself on being a platform where you could hear directly from journalists and authors – now incredibly down-ranks any posts with links. Instagram has fostered an entire startup ecosystem to handle the problem of “link in bio”. Meanwhile local news continues its steep decline while corruption and special interests seemingly run rampant.

Here in Hudson County, New Jersey, population roughly the size of Boston, our main local paper, the 157-year-old Jersey Journal is no more. Gone too is the Newark Star Ledger. Perhaps the fairest and most important and prestigious remaining gubernatorial primary endorsement comes not from a NJ publication, but from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Despite its salutary role in democratic accountability, all across the country, local news struggles. And we literally pay for it as borrowing costs have been found to rise with the closure of these papers.

Glimmers of Rebel Success

There are signs of hope. Though they don’t yet have the coverage, funding, or readership of newspapers of old, new upstart independent local voices have sprung up. With social media, people are tired of the incumbents and are eager to explore alternatives. There’s been growing interest in frontier protocols like Mastodon, powered by the open and federated ActivityPub. And Bluesky, built on an open and interoperable at protocol has doubled its userbase from 15M to 30M since the recent presidential election. While RSS readers have been forgotten, the protocol itself continues strong, still supported by most blogs and news websites. And there’s been growth in email newsletters, relying on the oldest open protocol of them all.

The new world has issues. With decentralization comes resistance to abuses of power. But with decentralization also comes fragmentation and new challenges. Finding content and sorting through the noise is not easy. Algorithms by themselves are not bad; people rightly fear algorithms, but the heart of this issue is *who* controls them. Like that old saying, if you are not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Arm the Rebels

The future of the Internet is a return to open protocols and direct connection between readers and publishers. Readers crave authentic, expert voices, even as and perhaps even more so as AI-generated content adds to the challenge of filtering through the noise. Patreon, Substack, and Ghost have proven that consumers are willing to pay for compelling, subscription content. But there are not yet good ways to manage those direct connections to voices and brands that you’ve opted into following without being at the mercy of algos.

Path.pub is an early experiment to build bridges across platforms, using protocols new and old. Join us as we build a new, smart reader that puts end users in control, build ways to support sustainable local news, and improve the signal vs the noise.

Matt Graham & Jimmy Lee
Founders, Path.pub