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.

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.

It depends on how optimistic, I feel:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

To other websites.
Like where we are right now.

I’m here. I don’t know about everybody else though.

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.

Take a look at the numbers - they aren’t exactly leaving so much as staying right there.

Reddit has become like YouTube (or Twitch, Tiktok, whatever) - it provides a never-ending stream of “content”, albeit most of it made from AI these days after they pushed a large fraction of the human content creators away. And the users seem to not care one bit if it is a repost made from a decade or year ago, even copying the comments section line-for-line. It’s not like anyone is really “listening” anyway, they are simply waiting for their opportunity to speak - “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe”, etc. We might despite such, but they seem to enjoy it? (which is good for us, as it contains them over there:-P)

And Twitter, well, you can see for yourself. It could work itself up to offering full-on Nazi propaganda - oh wait, it already has!:-P - and those users won’t mind. “It’s where my audience is”, they cry - ignoring how that is becoming less & less true, but also… isn’t it? Why aren’t they moving their content to Mastodon? It seems to have too many systemic problems, hence is losing ground already before it has even really started. Some users might go to Bluesky though.

Perhaps we’ll see a situation like TV where every provider offers “exclusive content” - the Fediverse being one, the Twitterverse (or whatever) being another, Reddit still yet another (with zombie resurrected content that people deleted, but it managed to scrape before that could happen, now reposted as bot-content under a thin guise of “no I’m a totally really real human, trust me bro” - plus, can you prove it, since despite you recognizing your words 100%, did you keep a copy of it, plus anyway they can trot out their legal claim to it in any case, hence whether they win or not either way you lose).

When I joined Kbin.social, I used to hold out STRONG hopes for the Fediverse. But then the former started dying, I moved to Lemmy, made the mistake of making a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, and another somewhere in Lemmygrad.ml, the feedback from which caused me to almost quit social media entirely… and now I no longer think that Lemmy will end up being very popular, i.e. burst out to include a more mainstream audience (certainly not a single person that I have recommended it to irl has anything even neutral to say about it - even programmers - and instead every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but… perhaps that’s not as fun for people, especially those not used to systems-level OS management tasks i.e. those who don’t use Arch btw:-D). I hope we are okay with that - definitely some people seem to prefer it that way even - but either way it is what it is. Though cross-platform aggregators like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks may hold some hope.

The experience from Brazil suggests that the viable ‘post-twitter’ is BlueSky. So one corporate-controlled platform that starts out okay and gets steadily worse is replaced by another, and the cycle continues.

I don’t think there is a viable ‘post-reddit’ unfortunately , because they built up their userbase at a time when people would actually want to use a link aggregator, before the experience of clicking any external links became fraught and exhausting. So now reddit has the userbase, and they have the means to host images and videos internally, and none of the bots or the lack of API or the general weirdness of the place is enough to get people to leave. Potential competitors assume that they should offer an alternative link aggregator, whereas really the only competitor is something that could magically offer a comparable userbase size.

IRC, duh!

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.

Something yet worse.

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.

We all came here. If Reddit and Twitter just deleted themselves, everyone that currently uses them might also come here. Or quit the Internet. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Eventually Justin Timberlake will overpay for them