Product-shaped or movement-shaped?

Yesterday I wrote about how the value for a product or service’s community may be different from the thing that drives its creators to build it — and unlocking and understanding that difference could be part of the key to making it sustainable.

The people building Bluesky might be excited to be creating a decentralized protocol and an open source platform, but it’s not a given that the people already using Bluesky care all that much about that. For them, it might be more important that there’s a real alternative to big tech platforms. The Mastodon team might be excited to build a federated platform using open source principles, but Mastodon users might feel more invested in the idea that their social channels are independent from US interests.

I want to go a little further and share a hypothesis:

Mission-driven founders often think the value of their work is product-shaped when it’s really movement-shaped.

Mastodon and Bluesky are often put in the same bucket because, despite their clear differences, the value to most users is the same: it’s not X. The people who use them and want them to succeed don’t want to post on X, but they also don’t want X to succeed. To them, the open social web is a movement that isn’t so much about decentralized protocols and open source software as it is about providing an alternative to X, and the worldview that builds and maintains what X has become.

The same goes for newsrooms. A newsroom that does substantial reporting on the administration (or local government, or anyone with power) is, to its audience, part of a movement that holds power to account at a time when people feel incredibly powerless. A newsroom that reports from a more representative perspective is part of a movement that is pushing against the traditionally very white, very coastal, wealthy demographic in newsrooms. The journalism is good, and is the engine for those movements, but the movements themselves are about liberatory change.

This is clearly an era where a lot of people feel more powerless, are more worried about the world, and are therefore more inclined to support something that seems to be making a difference. But it also isn’t a new idea. The web itself was also a movement: a push against a world where, again, a few mostly white, wealthy people in places like New York and London could dictate whose voices could be published and heard. Its value was not that HTML and web browsers were cool. It was that suddenly anyone could have a platform and all those gatekeepers could be disrupted.

In all these cases, it’s about who gets to have power, agency, and wealth.

So what should change?

Most projects and newsrooms are not comfortable with being this political. But I bet that if these organizations gather the stories of why the people who already love them are loyal, these are the reasons they’ll find. Embracing the movement side of their work will help encourage those people to deepen their support, allowing them to become more sustainable, and building a stronger foundation that allows them to broaden their base.

They can’t support the movement side of their work without the product side. Newsrooms are built on journalism; pro-social tech is built on platforms. But there’s a lot to be gained by changing how they talk about their value with their communities. Very few people care about decentralization or the journalistic process. Lots and lots of people care about their world changing for the better. And that, I would argue, is what their stories should focus on.