Twitter isn't important and federated social media will replace it to a point that it won't be anything more than a footnote in twenty years, or an unfortunate hurdle that was overcome as the internet matured.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Mind if I ask what makes you believe that federated social media will replace the mainstream ones? Literally everyone around me, everywhere I go, have no clue about any social media besides the big ones. I tried introducing mastodon to a few, but they found it harder to use.
When MySpace started becoming popular, most people had no idea about it. Then there was Facebook and most people had no idea about it either. Then there was Twitter and most people had no idea about micro blogging....
It's a repeating trend that eventually ends that a saturation point is reached.
Maybe Facebook and Twitter won't immediately or ever go away (Myspace still exists in some form despite a massive data loss!) but they will be occupied only by those who cannot and will not migrate away from them.
The other side of the coin is similar to when you find a cool spot to hang out and it starts to become popular until eventually one day you visit, it's full of brash idiots, the vibe is completely different and you wish that less people knew about the place.
Be careful what you wish for!
20 years ago this was everyone. The internet was too technical, people didn't really use search engines, an argument with a friend over who played the bad guy in a movie could go on for hours.
I feel that one day a large organisation will run a large centralised node, much the same way that Google runs Gmail. They can have a smooth onboarding process, no confusion about how to pick a server, and federation can be a footnote. They can pick up lots of non-technical users, who don't even need to understand that federation is a thing. But people on other servers can interact with them, and that's the important part. Over time people will start to meet people from other nodes and slowly be introduced to the concepts.
Remember Facebook is still mighty confusing and has it's own terminology that makes no sense to an outsider, but it's introduced slowly enough that you can get the basic concepts and slowly learn more. I feel the "pick a server first" model is what is the biggest hurdle at the moment.
Maybe it's just because I never really "got" Twitter, but this seems like a boring tautological argument to me. A more interesting question would be whether we even care? Platforms come and go. For some reason people seem to have decided that platforms have gotten "too big to fail", but it's clearly not the case.
Isn't it the same with Lemmy? After the many blunders of Reddit, many users there certainly want a good alternative. But Reddit also has not only techsavy users. Perhaps we should learn from this and offer people Lemmy "simply" as an alternative, without talking much about decentralization when introducing this idea.
I don't think that's really possible. I saw what happened when twitter users started trying Mastodon. There was a ton of confusion, and almost none of it was about terminology. The confusion was stuff like "Why doesn't search work like Twitter's" or "I can't see this person's posts". Trying to dumb it down only works when the details don't really matter.
That's the thing. You can't turn the clock back. As fediverse alternatives pop up and the social media old guard slowly declines, there will be a lot of fragmentation.
It was just as fragmented before the monolithic platforms came and unified them though
Social media so far has not been replaced with a like for like service when something falls out of popularity. Facebook was not just a Myspace clone. It probably won't be Bluesky or Mastodon that replace Twitter for most of their current users.
Ive been using BlueSky and it's a damn good alternative to Twitter. In fact, it captures what early Twitter felt like