Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everyone’s there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps, where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nicki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody together, hanging out in a single space. Now there are none.

I’d love to follow that up with, “and here’s the new thing coming next!” But I’m not sure there is one. There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It’s not just that there’s no sufficiently popular place; I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn’t be that hard. It’s just that the platform doesn’t exist. It’s not LinkedIn or Tumblr, it’s not upstarts like Post or Vero or Spoutable or Hive Social. It’s definitely not Clubhouse or BeReal. It doesn’t exist.

Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.

  • BrookieBee@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    All very true. Lemmy is the closest thing to a Reddit alternative that I’ve found so far. But the signup process was kinda hard, and the user experience of the apps (I’m using mlem now) needs work. It’s confusing and clunky.

    • notaseraf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Just tried wefwef and it’s actually quite good. Extra impressive when you realize it’s just a webapp

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I found it to be buggy and missing basic features at first, but it keeps updating almost every other day and now it’s how I use lemmy!

        • wtfeweguys@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
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          1 year ago

          Count me in on wefwef. I went from thinking Lemmy wasn’t ready to not even using Reddit anymore so because the UX I loved (Apollo) is now here and not there. Total 180 for me.

          Stoked to see the devs continue polishing it up. I’d donate.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The harder it is to get started, the more like “original Reddit” it will be.

      It was fun when Reddit was obscure. It got less fun when everyone and their cousin was on Reddit, it turned into other social media.

      • kescusay@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy may be more resistant to that. Hear me out… With Reddit (and Digg, and Facebook, and Twitter, and every dead or dying platform you can think of), you’ve got a single company owning everything on that platform. When short-term profit ultimately dictates they shittify the platform, it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and forethought to resist.

        Willpower and forethought the various platform owners clearly lacked.

        But Lemmy is an open source project, and anyone can spin up a Lemmy platform, then join the fediverse. If one platform’s owners decide to shittify, it doesn’t affect the rest, and everyone can easily migrate to another with minimal fuss.

        My impression is that this makes Lemmy much better situated to avoid ever becoming a late-stage Reddit.

    • lwuy9v5@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m genuinely confused - I made my Lemmy account a few weeks ago but wasn’t the sign up just “email”, “password”, captcha, click email link, done? Isn’t that the exact sign up of reddit and most websites?

      Sure - some instances have gated signups and require some questions / prompts - but a bunch don’t ? What am I missing? I’ve seen the “confusing sign up” comment a few times

      • Bonzo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Just echoing what you said here. It’s incredibly simple. Some don’t even require an email.

    • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com
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      1 year ago

      We can do our part to make it better and ready for the next wave of new users when Reddit fucking up again. The sudden influx of users already helped exposed issues the dev never anticipated, and add more people willing to help with developments and hosting additional instances. The thing that makes fediverse great is the community is actually have full control instead of the big corp that owns the platform and set the rules to maximize their own profit.