We have made the tough decision to sunset the City Guide app on December 15, 2024, with the web version following suit in early 2025.

I loved the OG Foursquare app. Back in the early 2010s, it was simply the best way to discover great new places, and the gamification was fun and innovative.

Its demise arguably began in 2014 with “the great unbundling”, aka the split in two separate apps: Foursquare (City Guide) and Swarm.
At the time, unbundling services into multiple app properties was all the rage, and for a company hellbent on taking on Yelp at all costs, it seemed the most natural way forward.

In order to appeal to a broader audience, all the gamified aspects were scrubbed off the main app, and the “check-in” functionality moved to Swarm. At the same time though, they removed most of the gamification (global mayorships, friends leaderboard, etc.) from Swarm too, further alienating their existing user base. Swarm was then supposed to be just another location sharing app for friends (to help us making plans together), a concept that has failed so many times I lost count.

Eventually, Swarm reintroduced global mayorships and the friends leaderboard a few years later, but it was too little too late, as most users already moved on at that point. What about Foursquare City Guide? Well, it has been in a zombie state for a while, with most of the user generated content being nearly a decade old now.

Swarm will still be there for the fools like me that still use it to check-in and keep track of new places, partly due to inertia and partly for lack of a (much) better alternative. As teased in the announcement, it might even be updated with some functionality from City Guide (a mini-rebundling?), but honestly I would not expect much more than maintenance and small quality of life updates.

Foursquare (the company) now only exists to monetize location data and analytics largely coming from usage of their API/SDKs.
Ironically, if they fully pivoted to the current business model sooner and left the core Foursquare UX untouched, instead of chasing the Yelp windmills (how are they doing now, btw?), Foursquare might still have a thriving social network, and with it, much more/better data to mine.

Imagine if you could follow an Instagram user from your Twitter account and comment on their photos without leaving your account. If Twitter and Instagram were federated services that used the same protocol, that would be possible. With a Mastodon account, you can communicate with any other compatible website, even if it is not running on Mastodon. All that is necessary is that the software support the same subset of the ActivityPub protocol that allows for creating and interacting with status updates.

Mastodon is a fascinating project. At surface level, it is similar enough to Twitter for people to consider it a valid alternative: the UI and the fundamental social constructs could not be more familiar. At the same time, you don’t need to dig too deep to encounter esoteric concepts like ActivityPub and the fediverse.

A common viewpoint is that Mastodon has failed to appeal to a broader, less tech-savvy audience so far due to its federation model, but I tend to disagree: after all we are using federated messaging systems every day and we’ll likely keep doing so until the end of time.

There was a moment when email itself was an esoteric concept and it was important to know what SMTP is in order to send a message, but we have managed to abstract all that complexity away, so I am cautiously optimistic about federated social media in the long run. Arguably the biggest challenge so far is the network effect (or lack thereof), as it’s hard to move to a new platform when all you friends are somewhere else. In that respect, feel free to follow me @maffeis@mastodon.social. Don’t be shy!

In all of these cases, the back pressure that gives wide review any force, beyond a moral high ground, is the fact of multiple implementations. To put it another way, why would implementers listen to wide review if not for the implied threat that a particular feature will not be implemented by other engines?

So yes, I absolutely think multiple implementations are a good thing for the web. Without multiple implementations, I absolutely think that none of this positive stuff would have happened. I think we’d have a much more boring and less diverse and vibrant web platform. Proponents of a “move fast and break things” approach to the web tend to defend their approach as defending the web from the dominance of native applications. I absolutely think that situation would be worse right now if it weren’t for the pressure for wide review that multiple implementations has put on the web.

Microsoft’s release of its new, Chromium-based, Edge browser has sparked renewed concerns about the rapidly decreasing diversity of browser engines. “All browsers becoming Chrome” is problematic in many ways, but while having bigger contributors like Microsoft in the Chromium project could actually help steering the project away from its Google-centric agenda, the issues intrinsic to relying on a single implementation remain open.