this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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My big take away is that social media as we know it is likely generational. Like real time broadcast TV, it may just not be a thing at all in the future, at least not with the centrality we’ve become accustomed to.
Polls run here and especially on masto bare this out. Mastodon, for instance, leans x-gen/boomer with some millennial in its demographic. It’s hardly a young persons thing. Once you realise so much of the praise and enjoyment of the Fedi is that it reminds people of the older days of the internet, the generational picture becomes pretty clear. 15 year olds today were born after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Forums, Usenet, old Twitter are probably like black and white tv to them.
At the moment, I think it’s a major flaw of the Fedi, that it’s fundamentally backwards looking, trying to preserve older big-social designs rather than doing something more diverse or at least different.
An obvious example being private or closed spaces like group chats and the like including public versions if desired. This seems to be a growing form of online interaction, that is in a way more humane or eusocial. But apart from matrix, which sits separately, the Fedi is still stuck redoing Twitter and Reddit.
There's only so many ways you can arrange a group of people, what they post and their audience. The fediverse is exploring most variations right now and it came up with things like decentralization and activity pub which are unlike any of the big platforms of yore.
It resembles the internet of the 90s only superficially. The underlying infrastructure and technology is completely different today. Most of the lean towards the 90s is caused by taking inspiration from the way they dealt with similar threats.
Where are:
Without wanting to be aggressive or critical of you here ... there's a good chance you, like many of us, are stuck thinking the internet can only be so many things because that's all we've been given for a while (like a long time ... like Twitter and Youtube have been around for longer than half the age of the internet, like we've arguable had real stagnation that might look like the age of Dinosaurs from the future looking back).
Have a look at https://fedidb.org/software, chances are something has popped up there.
Now that's a blast from the past if I ever heard one. Do people really don't understand why MySpace died? The notion of "personalized pages" went out of style several technological and social generations ago. They're not coming back, and not because it can't be done, because it's an antiquated idea in almost every way.
Given the above it's ironic that you perceive me as stuck in my ways. 🙂
Everything you listed can be done nowadays and there's software for it out there, way too much to list here. Thinking in terms of centralized and/or proprietary platforms is the old way. The new way involves offering services based on open source software, using portable infrastructure solutions, and making a privacy pledge to the users.
Everything you listed can be done either by setting it up yourself or by finding a service that offers it. There's a billion options.
I’m sorry, but I think you’re being too aggressive here and dismissive about how much is not easily doable on the fediverse. We’re not living in some open source utopia where there’s an abundance of awesome software waiting to be used.
A few quick thoughts.
But why would you go to a centralized platform for your website?
You can do that too btw, with services like Wix or Squarespace, or specialized services for various niches, like Flickr or 500px if you're a photographer etc.
You can also put together a website in an editor and host it on a generic service where you control your domain and everything.
How would you define and market a service like MySpace nowadays?
A quick and easy landing page for something with the ability to engage and interact socially over all of the platforms of the fediverse built right in.
It doesn't have to be centralised at all ... and I'm talking about what features are offered by platforms/software that are compatible with the fediverse such that connecting across it can be baked in. All of the specialised services are the sorts of things I'm talking about in terms of what's not on or easily possible (right now) on the fediverse, where the advantage of bringing such things to the fediverse is the possibility of easily reaching a wide audience while still owning your content and platform.
I am also going to say that nostr has all these things in some alpha form or another. However, it is very much a mess right now and it is harder IMHO to connect with others or curate my feed with stuff I like.
The advantage of small groups and fedi is starting with a small network and growing it slowly, this is more rewarding than starting with the whole world and trying to pull back.
Nostr might have all the features but its a mess right now
Try Nostr, it is all the Fediverse wants to be but better
I personally think activity pub is overrated. Not that it's bad or anything. But many think of it, IMO, as the beginning and end of a new form of social media and people taking back the internet. In reality, I think it's literally just a protocol and so much more than people recognise depends on what people build on top of it. So far, for example, the limited interoperability between lemmy/kbin and the microblogs/mastodon, which is not a simple bug fix away, at all, is a major friction between these two platforms that essentially forces them to be separate spaces/platforms. This is so despite both using ActivityPub and actually federating with each rather well. Because, it's not (just) about the protocol, it's about platform designs and structures ... IE the software ... and the protocol can only do or guarantee very little on that front.
From what I've gathered, the diaspora people didn't adopt activitypub in large reason because of this, and I think they've always had a point. The pain some users have gone through trying to work out how to use lemmy and mastodon together, having been promised that ActivityPub is a whole new thing that creates a deep and wide fediverse, has been awful to see.
I don't think that's the right takeaway. The demographics of certain platforms may be skewed, but people who for example were active on Facebook 10 years ago still exist, they're just posting a lot less.
I think engagement is down across the board because of various reasons: the continuing crappification of the various platforms, people are starting to realize the risks of oversharing and public sharing, people are getting turned off about loud toxic discussion, people are becoming aware that their data is being mined by faceless corporations who don't have their best interest in mind, in short all the negatives of these platforms have become more obvious to the average user.
What happens when they die?
So are you suggesting that posts are down because the people that were making them are dying off? I have my doubts about that one.
Facebook's demographic isn't skewed enough towards old people and it hasn't existed for long enough for that to be a significant effect.
I mean, it isn't as if octogenarians and septagenarians were making the bulk of Facebook posts 10 years ago, is it? The bulk of the people on Facebook are currently in the 18-44 range, and the 65+ group is actually a very small fraction. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/
I would also like to remind you that Facebook started as a way to connect college kids in 2005. Those kids are now in their 30s or early 40s and very much still around. They've just given up on Facebook.
So I was one of those back in 06 and I’m in my mid to late 30s now.
I don’t use Facebook anymore and stopped using Facebook a decade ago because of all the timeline changes.
My guess is they’ve continued to make the timeline stuff worse and worse and that’s why people stop posting cause you don’t actually see each others posts half the time it’s filled with random suggested shit.
Posting mostly drops to zero. Sometimes a family member will post on their account.
~~Death of the account holder has not been well managed.~~
Edit: what happens to the account after the person dies is not well managed.
You're talking about people in their 30s and 40s. Death won't be much of an issue for a few decades.
I’m thinking along those timescales.
I think you have a point. However, my 13-year-old and most of her school are all on Snapchat and use it constantly. They're also regularly posting TikTok videos. Kids get in trouble for doing them at school all the time.
Interesting! You think TikTok and Snapchat are counters to my closed group chat observation?
If so I didn’t mean to suggest that that’s where everyone is going. Not at all. TikTok and Snapchat would be examples of the generational factor I was talking about.
No, I said you had a point. I was just addressing the idea that, while it may be generational, even the current generation is still addicted to social media. Maybe less so, but still addicted to it.
Right! All good!
Strongly agreed.
Some other loose thoughts related to this:
God ... so sorry ... just had a coffee and mashed the keyboard ... looooong rant ... IN SHORT ... yes!!
Interesting thoughts here!
Somewhat relevant thread I saw on masto: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/110195840314469391 (which you may have seen yourself already).
Where are the group chats happening then?
As far as I understand, Discord and WhatsApp, with maybe Slack still a thing in that space and maybe Zulip doing a decent job at eking out an open source alternative.
And from what I've seen, it's a cool way to do online social media. I happened upon a Discord recently run by and for some people I was loosely in contact with online, and going in and saying hi and having and seeing some conversations, after being exclusively on the fedi for a while, opened my eyes to why it was such a thing ... compared to the feed generating focus of reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube style big social platforms ... it is truly SOCIAL media as it emphasises the creation of and interaction amongst an actual social group, not open ended public blog posting for the whole world to read and interact with. It also emphasises conversations, rather than "posts".
From what I've gathered it is likely the phenomenon that is the Fediverse's blindspot ... the "new" form of social media that is growing in place of or supplementary to big social ... that is making a better form of online social interaction without trying to "merely" modify the designs of big-social (where, let's be real, even decentralisation is really a modification more focused on ownership than the form of social media).
The article talks about DMs on those platforms, but mainly focussed on Instagram
Nostr
That one is common as people using Lemmy it seems.