Fediverse

I think its going to split and fracture, at least for the forseeable future. Just like how people who want too be free from corporate influence moved permanently from twitter to mastodon, so to will users who want to be free from corporate influence be drawn here. Those who don't care, or who buy into corporate propaganda will stay until and unless they can't tolerate it anymore, and even them they may just move to a different corporate platform.

in long term, yes

but we will have to improve it a lot before it becomes so easy that even the most smoothbrained individuals can use it

There is a powerful network effect to overcome here, and I don't think "being federated" is enough to overcome it for most people. Reddit and tumblr and discord offered us "what if all your forums/blogs/chatrooms were in one place" which is massively convenient, and why people flocked to those platforms. Thats a transformative user experience. being federated is transformative, but the change to the user experience -- beyond a larger barrier to entry -- is minimal. The point of mastodon is that its functionally equivalent to twitter without being centralized. But there are no decentralized places left on the internet, beyond those holdouts who are either very attached to their old technology or want to maintain their unilateral control over their platform, and who are unlikely to federate.

Not sure if it's the solution, but definitely a viable alternative to social media, not just for privacy enthusiasts.

No I don't think it will. I would be shocked if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc etc ever truly went away. If people remain dedicated to improving and promoting the fediverse it could carve out it's own space in the social media landscape. And once that happens you never know what the future holds. But I'd be surprised if it took over everything in the space

In the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.

No. While it's not that complicated it is still more complicated than current social media. People won't like that.

I don’t think it will replace it, but I do think that it will create a place for a niche group of conscious folks to build a community without the capitalistic aspects of life that have ruined a vast portion of the internet.

We just need to be sure to keep perspective and be ready to support and our server admins/developers. The lack of big tech funding is what could potentially hurt us here in the fediverse. Nothing is free and it’s on us to pay our own way before advertising starts to creep in.

It looks like they're going to merge

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub

Could it? Of course, absolutely.

Will it? Well, that's a much more complicated question, with a much more pessimistic answer.

Yes, I think so. It could. Is it likely to happen? No!

I see a distributed architecture central to have a “public space” online that works in the long term. The communication infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by any single party.

However the way people work and the way capitalism works, it's utterly difficult for something like ActivityPub to become the standard. F**book joining in frightens and encourages me at the same time.

For me personally it can. Not sure about everyone else.

I don’t believe that it will replace it but that is maybe a good thing. I’d be Ok with fediverse staying in niche with active user base, because once it’s mainstream it’s gonna attract corporations to enshittificate it like they did it with Twitter or Reddit.

And I’d be cautious with “Internet is flawed”, it’s for us more conscious users but for vast majority of people Internet unfortunately is fine.

As long as a hardware will be sold with microsoft/google/twitter/facebook by default, no chance fediverse replace all these well-established applications. BUT it's not a problem for me : i use what i like, open-source, and i let other use what they want.

I think it could replace reddit in the long term but the others I'm not so sure about. Twitter and YouTube still mostly function so people won't leave but without 3rd party tools and the lack of trust users have in reddit to develop those tools on their own that leaves them in a very bad position.