both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
I’m here. I don’t know about everybody else though.
I’m about 38% installed.
There’s a big diaspora right now.
If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.
a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive
This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I’m pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn’t easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you’re good.
On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
To other websites.
Like where we are right now.Outside I hope.
It depends on how optimistic, I feel:
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Very - Digg died and Reddit rose, MySpace died and Facebook rose. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die.” Reddit and Twitter are enshittifying rapidly and we are here for when people wake up.
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Not very - Big Social Media has reached critical mass/achieved escape velocity and they’ve hoarded all the “fuel” (people) that got them there. Other places aren’t going to take off like they did without hitting some unknowable level of active users and so growth is slow (if there is any growth) which creates a Catch 22 situation. It is easy to see this as all doom and gloom but the Fediverse is growing and may well wander across the threshold in which a positive feedback loop of growth starts happening at which point it seems like a viable alternative to the masses and they leave in droves putting the old places into a death spiral.
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Not at all - most people just don’t give a fuck how the sausage is made as long as they get enough attention and have no incentive to leave. Elon Musk good live stream himself barbecuing puppies and enough people would be able to shrug it off because they don’t want to lose their few thousand followers and all the little dopamine rushes that Big Social has trained us to rely on.
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The Internet does not care is the bottom line. Both are still large platforms. Should they stop existing in the distant future, nothing really will happen, people find new ways to waste their time or find 1:1 copies of what they miss.
IRC, duh!
Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we’ll all be yes-yessing each other’s dum dums.
There’s no shortage of cess pools
Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a “forums” tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It’s not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.
Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.
Right now Discord, Slack, and other chat platforms seem to be becoming dominant. But now everything is not only locked away from the open web, but also ephemeral.
Mastodon seems to be doing pretty well and continuing to grow. Lemmy seems to have been stagnant for many months now though. I guess we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something again before we’ll see another surge here.
Maybe to something more personally controlled, like everyone has a “server”(for feeds, “facebook”, etc etc that they like to do) and connects to what ever they want.
More ease of use ofc greatly needed.
Geocities?
Anyways, that would be interesting. There coupd even be a website that indexes all the personal sites. It could even highlight interesting things from those sites. Perhaps it would even organize those interests into sub groups that you can follow and keep up to date on new information added to those sites.
Something yet worse.
Well, I’d like to add, that most people do not use social media -almost interchangeable with internet for most folks- to interact with strangers in a reddit/discord/forum fashion… they just interact with people near them i.e. Instagram/facebook and so on.
Most people are in both of one of those and they are not going anywhere and not losing users, specially instagram.
Then you have things like twitter and tiktok, which are nor going anywhere anytime soon, yes lota of people went away from twitter, but those who stayed stayed for a reason (nazis and the hard right mostly)
So in summary, the internet, imho, at least for now, is staying right where it is.
Maybe reddit will fall, since the userbase was always more techy/quirky but they still seem to be doing fine, if your are ok with bots chatting with bots.
Eventually Justin Timberlake will overpay for them
