OPINION: An oblivious social media billionaire is sad his friendships suffered in social media era. Creates app to fix issue that no-one with real, genuine friendships will want to use. It’s the old, old tale.
With Twitter becoming a right wing hellscape and Bluesky stepping-up more as a replacement that will do well to resist becoming more of the same, there isn’t much out there for people with social media fatigue.
If you’re seeking more meaningful connection and good, old-fashioned real life hangs then the Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is right there with you.
The entrepreneur has launched Mozi, which aims to leave behind the days where friendship can be defined by a like, follow or comment, and return to a time when friendships were built by being together in the same place at the same time.
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Mozi’s premise is pretty simple and distilled down to a simple description: “Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.”
The idea is you can put your upcoming plans and upcoming trips into the application and people who you know and actually want to hang out with can see them. They can respond to a request to “hit you up” so to speak. As a user you’ll see “who’s around” and for how long they’ll be in town for, so you can try to arrange those IRL plans.
It all sounds very bougie though, to be honest. Designed for people who travel a lot for work or play, go on retreats, go home for the holidays, or visit fancy places where other fancy people hang out. It’s all very sanitary and business-like. It’d be great for those friends that send you a Calendly link to book a time if you want to give them a ring.
Mozi doesn’t actually sound like something real friends would use to see each other. Instead it sounds more suited to catching up with acquaintances, or former work colleagues, people you met at a conference or, dare I say, old flames.
If I’m home in the UK for example, I wouldn’t be waiting for my friends to check out an app to see if I’m going to be around and how long for. I’m badgering them weeks in advance, making plans, and seeing when they’ll be available so I can slide in to whatever’s happening. With any luck, they’ll be looking to contact me too.
For everyone else, the old school and collage friends I see from time to time, the people from down the pub, if we bump into each other, then great. Want to have a pint or a coffee? Awesome. I’m here for it. Maybe we’ll get closer as a result and we start badgering each other whenever I’m in town too?
This might come across as harsh, but Mozi sounds like something people without robust friendships would use. So perfect for the absolute tribe of awkward Silicon Valley social inadequates that have spent forever tearing at the fabric of society and lessening the value of true, real world connection through the apps we use on a daily basis.
If they’d thought more about that in the beginning, perhaps we couldn’t be in such a mess now? Folks like Williams played a role in this with Twitter. For him that contributed significantly to a net worth Forbes estimates as $1.9 billion.
Years later he’s bleating to the New York Times about how he “underinvested” in his friendships. I lot of us did, Ev, often because how normalised superficial online interactions like photo-viewings and post-likings became as a replacement for real world contact.
Many of us felt isolated in the social media age because the medium is inherently unsocial. We do it alone. Unlike some though, we don’t have almost two billion dollars to show for how superficial relationships may have become.
No matter how sad and lonely poor Ev’ feels in the social media age, another app from a social media architect that sets out to undo the damage done by the other social apps isn’t going to remedy this.
Franky it’s infuriatingly insulting.
