Meta's recent decision to allow claims of mental illness towards LGBT+ individuals on its platforms has sparked a wave of outrage. This new moderation policy...
What eventually kills these platforms is "death by thousand cuts". Enshitification, controversies, legal problems will alienate users bit by bit. Competing services will then make some people visit less and less until they stop coming at all.
These platforms are competing for peoples attention/time which is finite resource.
But in addition to what happened to Yahoo, Meta’s platforms also use the network effect to keep users. Once the tide turns and the network effect is stronger elsewhere the userbase may quickly evaporate, like what happened to MySpace.
Unless you're myspace. Myspace was great, until facebook just suddenly existed, and took over. Felt like it went from never hearing of facebook in 2006, to 2007 myspace is basically dead.
I think "forums" is what Lemmy kinda shoulda been. I've had people argue against me at this point, but...
lemmy.nsfw and the other couple of porn instances are the only ones that are focused by topic. Everybody else tries to be a general purpose instance, which results in that "Which instance do I pick? Will it matter being on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world?" issue and the "there are currently 94 communities with the name Linux, 20 with more than 250 subscribers and 12 that have seen some kind of activity in the last month" issues.
Lemmy could be used like a good old forum engine. Create an instance around a particular branch of discussion, but now they're federated.
Initially no real reason. Eventually you discover ones with administrators you vibe with and communities and users you like. But till then, maybe server capacity?
Do they need to? How did people decide on MSN vs AIM vs ICQ? Google vs Yahoo? Ventrillo or Team speak? Skype vs Zoom vs Discord. They will go where their friends are primarily. And what suits their needs generally. Federation isn't anything truly new. The massive centralized servers were. The fediverse is a return to form. Only better. Be on the service and server that suit you. No missing out.
I liked yahooIM and AIM, but I also had MSN Messanger.
I liked YIMs buzz feature. Imagine no matter what you're doing, the audio mutes for a brief second, you hear a loud doorbell, and your whole screen, not just yahooIM, YOU COULD EVEN HAVE THE WINDOW MINIMIZED!!!! Your whole screen would shake.
Man, people got used to having the whole internet in their pocket from barely knowing it existed in like 15 years. There are already cultural metaphors for federation. People will grok that shit in no time when they need to. But it will take the network effect forcing them to learn it that will get people over the hill.
At first, the internet was for nerds only and not "for the masses". Then corporations realized there was a lot of money to be made, and they forced user-friendliness on it. And then the masses came.
Don't worry, in two decades we'll have Fediverse 3.0 which will just be a balkanized assortment of sites that don't communicate with each other and are worth trillions, all owned by people who bafflingly support President Kid Rock.
It will die when there is an alternative app that competes with marketplace. That + messenger keep most people there. Signal (or whatsapp which while meta, isn't tied to fb account)'already can replace messenger.
That is simply the truth. Here is Belgium we have an app called 2dehands which is very prolific and have a way better interface and experience than marketplace (even though it is nowhere near perfect or great).
Marketplace is definitely completely secondary to 2dehands in the Flemish part. Brussels still uses marketplace a lot, but literally all marketplace needs in order to slowly die off is competition but the 2nd hand market is not a lucrative app space with no real funding opportunities outside of data sale so nobody does it.