So, where do we go now?

I’m all in on the Fediverse. It’s messy and a little confusing, but it has the best shot at making things better for all. Including corporations.

I don't agree with the author's conclusion. I believe that Fediverse and FOSS software will eventually become better and less daunting for users to use. They will eventually rule the social scene.

Why? Enshittification. Capitalist platforms objective is to make money. As long as that's their objective, they will always become worse. FOSS projects are truly social project where the ultimate objective is to create libre software for the sake of human connection. Money is not the ultimate leitmotiv of FOSS.

Hey, at least they acknowledge the existence of Lemmy and the Fediverse. They are right that it's still developing and not quite polished enough for mainstream adaptation, though Mastodon is pretty much getting there.

“What’s next appears to be chat rooms, and group chats, and forums.”

That’s not next, that’s where it began my friend, and I’m happy to see it. Being here reminds me of the wild west days of the net. Smaller amounts of content but enough to keep me busy, and good, civil discussions with people.

Decentralization was a thing back in the 1990s and 2000s with all of the little message board communities out there. I think people desire centralization without the drawbacks of control going to a small group of people so that's why we have the fediverse.

Like all this is more of a move back to how the Internet once worked. It's nothing new (at least to those of us who grew up with the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s).

For the past several years as "social networking" morphed into "social media" and we saw the way it was wriggling into every corner of life, even to the point of affecting elections across the globe, I was worried more and more.

As we've sort of come to grips with the inherent flaws or evils or whatever of social media, I am expecting a time in the not too distant future where we'll look back at the social media era with contempt, disgust, and shame (if we can remember how to feel shame).

Bring back big Usenet!

I don't really mind seeing this cycle wind down, however it does raise a question that's existed even at the height of these centralized platforms...What the hell do we use to chat with individuals online? Discord might work okay in small groups, but it's still a single company-owned platform, so those free servers aren't going to last and you'll lose that space eventually. The only big name alternatives that come to mind for decent cross-platform carrier independent chat are either owned by Meta/Facebook (Messenger/WhatsApp), or are Snapchat or Telegram.

Meta's problems are obvious to those that follow tech.

Snapchat's in a weird limbo so far as I'm aware, where it's no longer as popular as it once was, as younger demographics I think are skewing to TikTok now, and I don't know that it ever really saw wider or consistent adoption outside of those demographics. Beyond that Snapchat is just another single company desperately trying to monetize their platform as much as the rest.

Telegram's probably the most viable competitor to WhatsApp if I'm not mistaken, but the head of it & group behind it are as questionable as Meta/Facebook, at least imo.

I guess the real alternatives might be to try to set up and host one's own IRC/XMPP/Matrix servers, but...That seems impractical for small group chats, no? Or maybe it's not as costly nor cumbersome to spin up & maintain as someone not too familiar with it might think? 🤷

Edit: As to email as another option for individual comms, uhh, well all I know is that's probably the one thing you'll frequently see many self-hosting folks recommend against trying to host yourself due to major email providers by & large blocking random small self-hosted email servers.

Another journalist behind the curve. I just want to point out, none of those arguments are new, we've been saying that shit for awhile now. He could've written the same article weeks ago.

One thing i know for sure, there ain't no predicting the future with something like this. We'll not know where we'll end up until we are there.

Getting tired of these articles softballing the leaders of these companies, and then turning around and crapping on the open-source, federated alternatives.

But its the media, specifically the verge. They're going to defend the status quo, regardless of whats happening.

We go back outside. Into the real world.

Tbh I'm not sure I'll miss that era of the internet when it's gone. It's been shit to just about every single persons' mental health. We need the internet to be good for us, not to make us cynical and depressed.

I think the Fediverse is showing us a new future, but we're not there yet.

What I'm thinking of is each person has their own, personal, 'instance' online. It uses ActivityPub (or what replaces it) to connect to others. You can post a thought (microblog), or longer thoughts (blog), a photo (pixelfed), a video (peertube), a sound clip (??? - suggestions for Soundcloud-like Federation), etc., all on your own instance.

All controlled by you with others linking to your instance and/or your posts. Hubs like Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc., can all have User Profiles that you setup that aggregate your data to their hub. Lemmy would be setup to pull in any links you share on your blog, with comments to that share being microblogs/blogs that interacted with your post. Your Mastodon profile would pull in those microblogs with links back to the source/origin. Pixelfed would pull in any pictures in the links, plus any posted by user replies.

Every post would have associated "Traits" to define what type of media it contains. Posts would also have hashtags as a more granular and customizable way of defining media. AI makes these things semi-automated.

You could block traits, hashtags, hubs, instances, etc. to tailor exactly what type of experience you want to have. You could also block data scrappers, etc., from your instance if we can't get government to protect them by law for us.

So this is where I hope we're heading with a federated network of users.

meh, twitter and reddit are moving along just fine. this happens every once and awhile and nothing comes from it. the content on lemmy is bland. i think this will be a trend that dies off as more people don’t understand how it works.