I’m not the most on point as far as keeping up with the internet so possibly it is actually happening, but I have not yet identified a direct challenge to Facebook from the fediverse that has been settled on by those already here.
I was on Mastodon for a while but realized I hate Twitter-style interactions, as much as I enjoyed posting about all the stuff I’m into - as the Twitter people kept coming like waves of Saxons with funny hair on Britain’s fair shore, I got into some supremely silly arguments and then got out. I didn’t bother to wait for them to burn my village, they’re welcome to it.
I’m now giving Lemmy a go, because as far as participation in platforms, I lasted longest at Reddit, though I was gone long before the recent exodus. Hopefully my dogs, cats, plants and microcontroller projects will get some love from The Internet’s Good Strangers here.
But I was, in the early days, quite an avid FB user and considered it unleaveable until 2016, at which point I realized it was not just leavable but likely to get us all killed. I still have a (good parts of) Facebook-shaped hole in my online life, which is where all my real friends and relatives used to hang out for my daily perusal, and where I could send out my various snarks and know I was amusing at least one or two people who genuinely found my antics delightful. I’m not a troll but I’m definitely a Grouch, and even Oscar needed a hug every now and then.
So given that most of us are here because we recognized the cycle of enshittification at some point and decided to make a different choice, and given that we’ve so quickly embraced replacements for every other big silo, and given again that most of us were probably once on FB and used it to be connected to our real people… why have we collectively shied away from even offering a viable Facebook alternative?
Whenever I ask my more “woke” friends why they’re still there, it nearly always seems to be that their old relatives are all there. I can see that that would be a great challenge, to move them off of that pablum-crack. Maybe the Secret Council Of Woke Fediverse Elders is using all these lesser platforms as gamergate-like test runs to iron out the kinks in federation. Perhaps even the seeming willingness of Mastodon admins to let Meta poke their tentacles in the door is entirely a feint - perhaps Mastodon was never intended to be kept in the first place, but rather, is just a honey pot to gather important battlefield notes for the coming attack!
maybe?
It’s interesting too, back in the 90s, there was a steady stream of new stuff coming online always, but you did tend to run out of new stuff within a set period of time and need to go play Doom or something. I remember when the first Reddit phone app came out and there was this idea that you could just scroll forever, as a feature, and… hmm.
I look around and I see a lot of things being treated as not just necessary, but articles of faith, when discussing what social media needs to look like. Zero effort is one, and global reach is another. The former was never intended to be a feature of the internet, the latter is there as the default - a silo can only limit your reach, in the final analysis, but it can make you louder within its bubble I suppose, and it seems that a lot of us find that very important. I’m happy just to be discussing this with another presumably human and obviously rational brain, me. If I post my dog, I just need one “zomg so cute” and I’m satisfied.
Things are different now because everyone is a content creator now… everyone has something interesting, funny, informative, shitty they just have to share. Social media made sharing those things real easy. So, basically, now, there’s an endless supply of stuff you can scroll through. Everyone is online now, that wasn’t the case back in the 90s.
Things are what they currently are (easily accessible to everyone, even 90 year old granma that has no understanding of what the internet is, but her only living friend has an account on FB, so she told her to hop on board) bacause of the money insentive. Everything has a price tag nowadays. A perfect example, cryptocurrency. It isn’t worth anything, but someone decided to put a price tag on it and now, it’s worth a lot. And things can’t pan out any differently in a capitalist economic system where everything has to have a price tag. People sometimes think “you know, if we did this or that differently, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad”. At this moment in time, maybe, but you’re just postponing the inevitable. Things will be like this, sooner or later. A global shift in econmic orders has to happen in order for companies to lose insentive in gathering data (they make signups and other things easy so more people will get hooked and be online as long as possible) and just stop developing the platforms… which in turn will drop the user base and eventually, the plaform will die. If you can’t sell the gathered data or use it to make money, it’s worthless.