A tech industry veteran, Mike McCue sees an opening for a different kind of internet where algorithms don’t call the shots. Mr. McCue, the chief executive of the internet company Flipboard, is challenging social media’s automated grip on our attention, betting that humans, not machines, should curate online experiences.
Three decades ago, as vice president of technology at the groundbreaking tech company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped democratize information access through the World Wide Web. Now, he’s positioning his company’s new Surf browser as part of a growing community of so-called decentralized social media options, alongside emerging platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon.
The timing could be fortuitous, as online publishers struggle with an old problem and a new threat. For years, they have worried that the internet’s middlemen — huge platforms like Facebook and TikTok — have weakened their ties with the people who read or view their material. Now publishers face another issue: New A.I. systems that could completely eliminate those fraying links with their audiences.
Surf offers a window into a quiet technology movement echoing the early days of the World Wide Web. With the aid of several internet technical standards that are intended to encourage the growth of a new kind of social media, Mr. McCue has created a potential path where media companies can build direct relationships with readers.
In contrast to the current social web, which is dominated by a few large technology companies, the new software protocols may seem a bit wonky for now. But they make it possible for internet users to communicate and share information without relying on a single centralized service.
One of the new technical standards is known as ActivityPub. Social media platforms using the protocol can talk to one another, allowing users on different networks to interact seamlessly — similar to how email works across different providers.
ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium, a technology standards-making organization. The standard initially drew scant interest. But Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, in 2022 has created an exodus of users and publishers looking for alternatives.
Surf allows phone, tablet and personal computer users to curate feeds from a variety of sources into a single dashboard-like view. It will also allow them to publish personally curated collections of information.
Surf is still being privately tested by Mr. McCue’s small company, which plans to offer the program freely later this year. Yet while the open social movement is still small, it has gained attention every time there is a disruptive event such as Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Decentralized social media gained significant momentum in 2023 when Meta adopted the ActivityPub standard for its X competitor, Threads, and later announced plans to connect with other ActivityPub-based services. What Mr. McCue calls the “open social web” already has more than 300 million participants, he estimated, and the bulk of them are now Meta’s Threads users.
The shared goal of leading users out of silos accelerated with the recent success of Bluesky, which the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched in 2023. Although it is built on a rival standard known as the AT Protocol, a bridge has already been built between the two protocols to make it possible for users of the social media services to connect.
“Everyone has just been copying each other’s features in walled gardens, but now innovation will become decentralized around human connection,” Mr. McCue said in an interview.
Mr. McCue, 56, co-founded Flipboard as a digital news aggregator in 2010. He has made a career of being early to exploit changes in internet technologies. He started Paper Software to make it possible to visually display 3-D information in web browsers and then sold the company 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 possible to receive internet information via the phone. That company was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.
One of the most significant potentials of the open social web is that it will permit companies to step away from invasive advertising, Mr. McCue said. He describes the alternative as “contextual” advertising to particular interests rather than individuals. For example, ads can be posted to web feeds focused on topics such as backpacking or fashion.
“The notion of creating an audience rather than chasing traffic is something we have been exploring,” said Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a popular news and media website. “ActivityPub might facilitate that by allowing for more direct and meaningful engagement with our readers.”
In addition to Meta’s decision to base Threads on ActivityPub, news organizations like Bloomberg and the BBC have begun experimenting with the technology, as have blogging platforms such as Medium, WordPress and Ghost.
ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as Mastodon, a microblogging service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of over 14,000 host computers, as well as start-ups like Pixelfed and PeerTube, distributed services that offer features similar to Instagram and YouTube.
For several decades, Google’s dominance of internet search has been the driving force behind content creation and distribution. But as Google has invested in generative-A.I. summarization for responses to users’ queries, a window of opportunity for all kinds of discovery tools in addition to chatbots has made the need for alternatives more urgent.
That is a far cry from the very early roots of the World Wide Web in the work of Theodor M. Nelson, who, while a Harvard graduate student in 1961, noticed that text on the first computer monitors could move and that writing no longer needed to be linear. He invented the concept of hypertext, which was later adopted as the underlying structure of the World Wide Web. The designers of the new open social web services believe that their alternative is a step back toward the internet’s original ideals.
“It goes back to the original principles where the internet started out as decentralized,” said Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social networking platform that allows users to join independently operated servers while staying connected through a global network.
The transition from centralized to decentralized models will require a cultural shift among both publishers and audiences.
“There are significant product questions to solve, such as how to handle moderation and content discovery in a decentralized environment,” said Mike Godwin, a lawyer known for his work on internet rights and digital culture. “But these are the kinds of new problems we should be facing, ones that come with genuine innovation.”
Despite these challenges, the enthusiasm among the early adopters reminds some internet pioneers of the first few years of the World Wide Web.
“The energy around ActivityPub reminds me of the early days of the Web,” Mr. Nelson said in a recent interview, “where anything seemed possible, and innovation was around every corner.”
