Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
IMO, all it takes is a company or companies willing to invest in their own large, stable instances that work in a way digestible to the masses. If they get large enough, they can choose to only federate with each other in an attempt to choke out smaller imstances, or only federate with instances that allow ads, etc.
With that said, people add “reddit” to their google search so they can get information from actual people, free of shilling. People find value in “ad free.” People value wikipedia. As services like lemmy continue to develop, I’m hoping the UX and on boarding become more palatable to the layuser, growing the population and getting people used to the whole concept and its value, so when the big money backed instances start up, they’ll notice the difference.