There is a running joke in biology that everything eventually turns into a crab. Carcinisation is when the same crab-like body plan keeps popping up in evolution, in lineages that are barely related, simply because it turns out to be a good shape to be. Lately I keep thinking the open social web is doing something similar: if you look at what people are building across the fediverse, the atmosphere, and Matrix, a lot of independent projects, reasoning from completely different starting points, tend to arrive at roughly the same answer to what these networks are for.

What I find interesting is that the answer to that question has never really been decided by anyone. What the open social web is for is a collective understanding, something the whole community works out together, and over the past decade it has changed multiple times. For a long time that understanding was set by whatever the dominant product happened to be. Mastodon was so dominant that "the fediverse" simply meant microblogging, even as Lemmy and others were already doing something else. Atproto reframed the whole thing around composability and credible exit. The past year added a layer of European digital sovereignty on top. And the shift I have been writing about most recently is the move towards private, bounded spaces, which is where the title comes from.

The easy way to read that convergence is as natural evolution, with separate teams arriving at the same shape because it is simply the right one, the protocol world growing its own crab. I want to question that reading. These teams are not independent the way crab lineages are. They go to the same conferences, follow each other on the social networks, and rely on the same (limited set of) funders, which makes me suspect the convergence is at least partly a story the community is telling. This means that the shape of what the open social web becomes is (at least partially) determined which version of the answer funders are interested in. I want to use the talk to look at how these collective understanding have shifted over time, and where it seems to be heading next, and to make the forces shaping it more visible.