Chat

I'd like to think so, but I do wonder whether that's mostly due to me being in my 40s and fondly remembering the internet before it was all owned by four companies. Is it nostalgia, or were things genuinely more agreeable back when it was all forums as far as the eye could see; forums that were owned and run by random people with no real financial skin in the game.

At my peak I had five forums that I regularly posted on: all of them are long gone now. But what's Lemmy if not just a bunch of different forums?

Honestly it seems like social media as we know it is kind of dying. Fewer and fewer young people are using Facebook and Twitter. I think it's going devolve back onto more forum based ala Lemmy, tildes, squabbles, reddit, etc where people can joing the communities they enjoy, and also through discord, WhatsApp, etc for chatting with people in those interests.

I'd like to think so, and I hope I'm wrong here, but probably not.

The decentralized communities are definitely going to grow over the coming weeks to years, and that's awesome and very welcome, but I don't think they'll ever reach enough critical mass to supplant the big players.

For example, a lot of people I know are fully aware Facebook sucks, but it's also the only way they are able to keep in touch with certain groups of people (family, old school friends, etc). There would need to be some coordinated effort on all of their contacts' parts to move somewhere else, and a lot of them fear losing touch with those that can't/won't make the switch. That's also not factoring in the learning curve to leave a familiar platform. I'm thinking specifically of grandparents who are on FB, but it doesn't apply just to those.

I do think there will be a steady influx of users from the big players and the content quantity/quality on Lemmy et al will definitely improve, but I feel the decentralized platforms will always remain secondary to their "big tech" counterparts.

There's also currently too many steps for users beyond "install app, turn off brain, and start scrolling". As sad as it is, that's all many people want: an app that lets them mindlessly scroll.

And, IMO, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I feel like Reddit has experienced a lot of "brain drain" the last month and more quality content is appearing on Lemmy rather than Reddit. It's been absolutely refreshing not seeing screenshots and reposts from other social media in my feed, and I think the barriers to entry for decentralized social media are contributing to that.

Gosh, I sure hope so.

I think what you said though

Maybe we won’t end up being the top 5 pages on the internet but we just have to grab a good portion of people to compete more directly with the big corpos.

is actually pretty achievable and honestly my current best-case-scenario. I don't know how realistic or sustainable it'd be for federated, decentralized social media to act as a full replacement for corporate, centralized social media. It would be great if federated social media could represent a larger part of the social media space than it does now, and thus be considered a viable alternative by the public.

My preferred direction for federated social media would be for it to continue taking creative approaches to social media and highlighting ActivityPub's potential utility and interoperability. I'd also like to see more federated software which doesn't seek to replicate existing services but rather tries to produce novel experiences. Rather than giving us Reddit -> Lemmy or Twitter -> Mastodon/Calckey/etc., coming up with more unique types of content to serve, or more unique ways to serve that content.

It could very well be!

But truthfully, I don't think... Most of those decentralized platforms seems a bit young and imatures. Imature software makes it meh to use, but I think, since the communities are figuring out their power, and what they can do, from the outside it looks like a full on war against each other...

I think the beauty of it (independent instance that can federate[or not]) will also be the reason why "normal" people won't join.

I would say it's chances are about the same as it being the 'Year of the Linux Desktop'

Its possible. Big social appears to be running their users away rapidly with bad decision after bad decision.

I don't think we should try to compete with the big corporations. The Fediverse is best as an aggregate of different communities, not a massive platform. We are currently having lots of growth as the result of Big Tech's failures. People are seeking community elsewhere, and some are finding it here. But the important thing was never if they joined the Fediverse, it is if they find community.

What really matters is something we cannot do here on this platform, it is making the physical world one that can support the communities that people had before social media. This is how we will break the hold of corporate social media. That's a lot harder though, and while vitally important (its necessary for solving most of our collective problems) it is not something we can realistically achieve on BeeHaw. We can improve the Fediverse though, I've been loving the conversations here and elsewhere on this topic! But we do not need to beat the tech companies at their game, and trying to may not lead us down a good path in the long run.

I would love that.

Probably not. Most people still use centralized services and have no idea of the fediverse.