Technology

The day I don't see "join our Discord" where I would earlier expect to find "visit our forums" will be a good day.

A bloated live chat monolith is not what I want to use to discuss game bugs or podcast episodes.

I just hope this is the start of an internet renaissance with less corporate control.

I honestly don't think the fediverse will become nearly as popular as many seem to.think. It's still complicated to use/understand for many non-tech enthusiasts, and in the case of Reddit, while people are angry, I doubt most of their users are going anywhere any time soon. Some will leave, but it's not going to be a small number.

We keep going on about how Reddit relies on it's "creators", without whom they'll die. Frankly, a lot of the highest rated content is just repost of old videos or tiktok videos. A lot of that stuff isn't original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they're not exactly over represented.

Discord:

They started the software as a light weight voip solution for gamers. And imo they kinda lost focus a long time ago. It is now a sluggish, bloated, messy piece of electron software that has privacy issues and runs very poorly. They keep adding new features that are all paywalled and the pricing is just unreasonable. I'm not against paying for a service at all especially if it is free of ads but i feel like 10$ a month is just way too much for a chat app.

Github, but Gitea's not yet federated, though they're working on it.

Discord is doing a lot of stupid things lately i must say

I'm thinking Twitch. Discord, imo, is just starting down the bad path but it still does what it's supposed to do very well. Twitch, however, wants to enforce rules on content creators that might lead to them leaving entirely.

YouTube. It will be a real loss because I doubt even Archiveteam could backup all the useful YT videos.

Well, I don't think it will STB, but YouTube needs a FOSS equivalent that has the same capabilities sans ads. But, that's $$$$ infrastructure so I don't know if that will ever come.

BUT, I really hope that by the time Discord pisses off its users, that matrix or another federated equivalent will have figured out the UI/UX to capture a large chunk of those users. I used to live in IRC, but discord finally killed it. And I hate using proprietary software for so much chat.

There isn't much left.

First Facebook with their whole meta thing, then Imgur deleting all NSFW content and images uploaded by non-registered members, afterwards Twitter and now Reddit.

Twitch made a big mistake with their new sponsoring rules, but seems like they are reverting / changing it again due to bad community feedback.

Discord had a few changes the community didn't like, but nothing ground breaking yet. But they get more and more greedy and their platform is filled with scams, hackers, bots and sadly many bad people like child predators and content which Discord support does nothing against. They seem not to care.

YouTube, well, I think they might be next actually. More and longer unskipable ads, restricting or demonetizing many videos, bad communication with their creators and less rewards for smaller creators. In addition, they might put high quality resolutions behind their already existing expensive subscription paywall. There isn't any competition which is urgently needed.

UPDATE: Bad news about YouTube continues. Just now, YouTube Ordered ‘Invidious’ Privacy Software to Shut Down in 7 Days.

Which other big social media platforms are left?

I still like IRC and I’m surprised that it got almost completely murdered by Discord.

Discord already kinda sucks, I find the app not nearly as smooth as before, and it tries so hard to choke nitro into you, it also has so many bloaty extra features.

Maybe it's just the use I try to get from it. Discord has evolved more towards community channels, and for that (at least the bit I tried to use them) it seems fairly decent. Most of the time I just wanna use it to play with 2 or 3 friends, I could definitely use a minimalistic app that does just that.

What about YouTube?

I looked online and there seems to be PeerTube at least.

I hear that YouTube and Twitch are in the process of enshittifying, so probably them. Would also like to see Discord get replaced by something like Matrix, but I think the UX isn't ready for that yet. On the plus side, the Matrix protocol supports bridging to other chat platforms, so that's cool.

Twitch tried to implode a few days ago. I'm hoping for YouTube, it's too much of a monopoly.

Personal Knowledge Management Apps / Note-Taking Apps.

After EverNote and Co. many people got angry / fustrated.

Since I found https://obsidian.md I'm actually happy with everything - as the plugin's are open-source, it's flexible and there is no lock-in as it's all simply markdown format. ObsidianMD is just a markdown viewer - but with superious UX. There are also alternatives to that like Logseq though.

After seeing this, I cannot imagine anymore to use something like Google Notes, OneNote, etc.

Yes please Discord, it is so worrying how everyone has all their private messages and content in an unencrypted app owned by a corporation who gives 0 shit about privacy. They won't even delete your messages if you delete your account/leave servers / get banned. In fact there is no way to delete all your messages

Well some Discord channels are already synchronising their content with Matrix, using the room feature to mimic the channel structure. OpenStreetMaps does this for example. I wouldn't mind that normalising as at least, it stops me from needing to use Discord myself. But the fact it still synchronises back to Discord is, of course, not ideal. Small steps to the right direction I guess.

Replacement would be nice, but I mainly use it for some local communities which I expect will be the last to migrate. They barely got a start on Discord...

With people learning about Fediverse, I'm guessing Instagram. Why? Because IG has become overwhelmed with influencers and TikTok-like junk. The initial wave of people into Pixelfed will be techies that want a break from that scene. Their friends will hear about it. The friends that just want to have an IG-like experience to share their pictures with friends while avoiding all the rest of the noise will slowly transfer over. Once they hit the critical mass, the switch will happen. This will take at least another year or two.

A logical extension of your post really makes you think just how much of social media post-2007 was set up on fundamentally unsustainable business models. Engagement is not a good business model! Making investors pay for users was always a bad choice and sooner or later, investors were going to ask for their money back!

It will be interesting to see how social media changes post-2023. With Meta almost vestigial (except Instagram and marketplace), Twitter and Twitch absolutely clowning away their positions, what's next? Jeff Bezos and/or Daddy Sundar reinvesting in social media?

I highly recommend watching Louis Rossmann's video on Reddit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqL-G3GFqRU&t=728s

I'm 90/10 on it being YouTube. I mean, they've already shit the bed plenty in the past. But with all the fediverse stuff picking up steam, Peertube is just sitting there waiting to enter the discourse.