[Erin Griffith at the New York Times]

I've been using Mozi for a little while and like it quite a bit:

"Mr. Williams views Mozi as an attempt to return to social media’s original intention, which was about interacting with people you already knew. Over the years, social media companies evolved into just plain media — a place for watching videos from influencers and professional entertainers, reading links to news stories, sharing memes or impulse shopping via highly targeted ads. Many of the apps are optimized to get users hooked on an endless scroll of new information."

Here I've got to offer a disclaimer: I used to work with Ev Williams at Medium, and have chatted with him a number of times since leaving that position. I'm also friends with a few people in that circle (who were either involved in early Twitter, early Medium, or both). I like him and think he has good instincts about what the web might be missing for regular people. I also know and like a founder of Dopplr, which apps like this all owe a debt of gratitude to.

For all my hyping of decentralized social media, the underlying tech isn't the thing: it's the use case and the way it builds relationships between people and communities. What I like about Mozi is that it doesn't attempt to horde your engagement or intermediate your relationships: it uses your device's existing (inherently-decentralized) messaging tools and address book to stay in touch but adds a kind of presence layer over the top.

Also, this:

"Consumer apps like Mozi are out of step with the tech zeitgeist, which has centered most recently on artificial intelligence."

Honestly, thank God. And I'm grateful that the team is talking about monetizing through premium features that provide extra value, rather than advertising or selling to data brokers.

In other words: hooray for a good old-fashioned app that tries to behave well and add value.

#Technology

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