An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
I am hopeful that a sizable chunk of people are smart enough to see the writing on the wall with corporate owned media and will inevitably follow to the non-corporate-controlled places (like the fediverse model). The danger will be the model falling over as the temptation to centralise, control, and exploit becomes higher. The lemmy model only works if there isn’t a dominate server with a large proportion of content right? What happens if lemmy.world gets big then just decides to de-federate? It’s just reddit all over again.