Critical mass in the Goldilocks zone

The use of the phrase “critical mass” in this NYTimes story about the enshittification of Goodreads stopped me in my tracks.

Give all of Goodreads’s issues, it might seem easy enough to encourage writers and readers simply to flock to another forum. Sites like The Storygraph and Italic Type have sprung up as promising alternatives, but they’re still far from reaching a critical mass of users.

Nuclear physicists know they are dancing with the devil when they bring fissile material to criticality. They also know that the reaction can be controlled, that it must be, and that the means of control obey well-understood principles.

Social sites typically push toward supercriticality with no such understanding. If Goodreads enshittifies at 125 million users, why would another service expect a different outcome at similar scale?

We can learn from a natural experiment. Not mentioned in the story is a long-running service, LibraryThing, that’s been going strong since 2005. I interviewed its founder and lead developer, Tim Spalding, back in 2008. Listening to that interview again today reminded me that everything I loved about LibraryThing remains important and matters even more now.

LibraryThing was, and remains, a place where you make and share lists of books in order to connect with other people and with books — not primarily via friend relationships but rather book relationships. It’s a small business that’s kept Tim and his crew happily engaged in serving a few million bibliophiles, some of whom pay a membership fee to be super-cataloguers.

I’m not in LibraryThing’s core demographic. Books aren’t as central to my life as they are to members of the service who carefully curate their own lists, tag books and authors, contribute to a common knowledge wiki, and write reviews. But I appreciate their work when I visit the site.

Today I added Ed Yong’s remarkable An Immense World to my list. Among the book’s dozens of reviews on the site, I found a 2000-word essay that usefully highlights many of the strange (to humans) powers of animal perception that Yong describes.

I guess LibraryThing isn’t on the Times’ radar because it hasn’t reached a critical mass of … what, exactly? Tens of millions of people? Hundreds of millions? I’m glad it hasn’t! That’s a recipe for meltdown. LibraryThing has been going strong, for almost two decades, in the Goldilocks zone: neither too little activity nor too much, just the right amount for meaningful experiences at human scale.

I feel the same way about Mastodon. Conventional wisdom says it’s dead in the water: “nobody” goes there, no Mastodon apps rank highly in the app stores. But if critical mass means operating at the scale of Twitter or Facebook, then who wants that? Who benefits from the inevitable enshittification? Not me, and probably not you.

LibraryThing shows that a controlled reaction, at smaller scale, is sustainable over time. Mastodon so far has been successful in the same way, and I see no reason why that can’t continue. Although Mastodon is young, my connections there date back to social networking’s roots in the early blogosphere. It feels like the right amount of critical mass. For me, a billion people on Mastodon is an anti-goal. I would much rather see hundreds or maybe thousands of healthy communities emerge, each operating in its own Goldilocks zone. Many small and safe critical masses, instead of a few huge and dangerous ones, powering small businesses whose proprietors are — like Tim Spalding and his crew — able to maintain real relationships with their customers.

That global conversation we thought we were having on Twitter? We don’t know how to control that reaction and I’m not sure it makes sense to try.