Future of social media in 5/10 years from now?
Future of social media in 5/10 years from now?
Hi, I would be interested in people's opinion on the future of social media. Would activitypub ever become mainstream among "normies" that lack technical literacy?
How would monetisation work on a decentralized platform? Would the creator be limited with merchandise and promotions without ads?
Big tech walled gardens have made the internet worse. The only way you can find something on google is by appending the term "reddit" at the end of the search query. To many AI generated SEO clickbait wordpress pages.
All of the good content is locked behind a login screen.
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This is all conjecture, but:
- The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter will get forgotten. Threads will get some momentum and then people will forget about it. Mastodon will likely grow, but it'll never grow to the same size as Twitter.
- Reddit will also go kaboom. Most users will go to Discord, a sizeable minority will come to Lemmy, old style forums will see a small comeback. As the above, Lemmy will also grow, but not to the point that it becomes as huge as Reddit.
- Depending on how the Kbin side of the fediverse plays its cards, it might go huge or it might get a small growth. It has the potential to attract users from both Twitter+Threats and Reddit.
- Facebook will get worse. To the point that not even your grandma will want to browse it. Eventually Meta will decide to cut off the losses and divert resources to other enterprises (specially WhatsApp and Instagram), making it even worse. I don't think that it'll last 10y. I think that this model of social network won't get a good replacement.
- Instagram might get some losses, but nowhere as bad as FB. PixelFed will see a modest growth.
- Discord will get huge regardless of enshittification, and this is what will promote the beginning of some activitypub alternative to it.
- Some Wikia-like activitypub platform will pop up. Initially "attached" to other services (mostly Lemmy and Kbin), but eventually dwarfing them. The relationship will be mostly symbiotic though.
- YouTube will stay. As shitty as possible. Google is not dumb, YT is one of its cash cows and they'll tweak YT to be as annoying/advertising/shitty as still bearable by its users.
So overall I think that the fediverse will get huge, but none of the underlying platforms will. The main strength will be how they connect to each other.
The kind of people who obtain information and discourse from reddit would never wish to obtain it from discord. They're not even remotely similar in approach.
I still use both and they don't come close to serving the same purpose
I've seen at least one sub (r/conlangs) partially migrating to Discord. They might not like it, and I do agree that the approach is not even remotely similar, but Discord is still able to somewhat fill - poorly - the same role as Reddit, so with Reddit going kaboom Discord will partially absorb redditfugees.
Discord is also in a position to absorb some twitterfugees.
If discord adds more persistent web space that's searchable by web crawler, I could Discord see become this replacement. Right now it's too gated behind individual communities.
Fully agree.
I hope that it doesn't though. We don't need yet another centralised platform that can and will go rogue, and is already showing signs that it wants to go rogue.
Makes me wonder how the inevitable advertising bubble bursting will impact a lot of these platforms, too. A lot of these exist only for advertising.
I'm gonna guess that you're on the money for Facebook, though they will break Marketplace into its own service and probably maintain Messenger as well until eventually merging it into WhatsApp.
Reddit is going to get bought up. If they go public, they'll be undervalued and cheap to buy given all of the controversy and instability among the userbase. If they stay private, they'll continue enshittifying until costs exceed income and they have no choice but to seek a buyer. The thing about Reddit is that they are valuable and they know it, but they don't have the ability to capitalize on that value with their business model. They are valuable as a training model for AI, and eventually some big company (Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon maybe) will buy Reddit for cheap just to use their content as a training model. And potentially de-enshittify the site in the process when the revenue model becomes the content itself instead of the eyeballs consuming it. But I am assuming it will implode eventually once they have everything they need. The company that buys it will spin it off into some AI-driven platform that feeds you the content it knows you want to see and Reddit itself will be slowly phased out.
Agree YouTube will stay, but Google's going to start forcing YouTube Premium more. If ad money dries up, I almost guarantee that they'll impose restrictions or incentives (maybe a combination?) on monetizations for creators. If you make your videos publicly available, you get a miniscule cut and you're capped at 1080p@30, 10 minutes or less or something like that. But if you make your videos YT Premium exclusive, you get a bigger piece of the pie and better quality/support. Google will up the price of Premium again but break out Music and Ad-Free into separate subscriptions that each cost marginally less than the two together cost today.