Where will the internet go post-reddit and post-twitter?

I'm here. I don't know about everybody else though.

I’m about 38% installed.
- 38% installed
  
  That sounds like a superb band name.:-)

There's a big diaspora right now.

If the fediverse can get more user-friendly instead of being a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive, it could be a lovely new home with lots of flexibility.

99% of the time when I would get the most batshit insane replies to a comment, they would be from three instances that mine had not defederated from. i.e., instances are not just like emails - not entirely - but instead there is a whole culture associated with each, made more complex to learn bc people lie about them, especially each of us about our own:-).

Also links to communities are totally broken in the web UI - e.g. unless you happen to have your account at midwest.social, clicking lotrmemes@midwest.social will take you away from your instance, where you can't vote or comment and your preferences are all ignored (!lotrmemes@midwest.social will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).

But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so... not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things. Plus most people seem to simply lurk anyway, based on the differences between upvotes vs. comments in most content.
- !lotrmemes@midwest.social will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).
  
  If you see it a few times, are you not going to notice intuitively how it works? Also, even if you don't use a ! link, usually people with comment with one
  
  But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things.
  
  Piefed is in Python, Mbin in PHP, Sublinks in Java. It's more about the lack of contributors than the languages themselves
a bunch of programming linuxites lying that their stuff is totally intuitive

This is my least favorite part of the fediverse. I'm pretty tech savvy, and the jump to Mastodon when Elon took over and Lemmy when apps stopped working wasn't easy. Having to pick an instance to sign up with was a huge roadblock for me.
- Mastodon discovery seems harder to achieve than Lemmy, probably because there are only a few Lemmy instances with active communities, so as long as your instance is federated and there are enough users to have subscribed to most of the communities, you're good.
  
  On Mastodon I always felt like the number of different instances and different people posting (each being their own mini community) made it harder to assess whether you were actually seeing everything
Although part of the difficulty is that if you're coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.

Take a look at the numbers - they aren't exactly leaving so much as staying right there.

Reddit has become like YouTube (or Twitch, Tiktok, whatever) - it provides a never-ending stream of "content", albeit most of it made from AI these days after they pushed a large fraction of the human content creators away. And the users seem to not care one bit if it is a repost made from a decade or year ago, even copying the comments section line-for-line. It's not like anyone is really "listening" anyway, they are simply waiting for their opportunity to speak - "^This", "I also choose this guy's wife", "and my axe", etc. We might despite such, but they seem to enjoy it? (which is good for us, as it contains them over there:-P)

And Twitter, well, you can see for yourself. It could work itself up to offering full-on Nazi propaganda - oh wait, it already has!:-P - and those users won't mind. "It's where my audience is", they cry - ignoring how that is becoming less & less true, but also... isn't it? Why aren't they moving their content to Mastodon? It seems to have too many systemic problems, hence is losing ground already before it has even really started. Some users might go to Bluesky though.

Perhaps we'll see a situation like TV where every provider offers "exclusive content" - the Fediverse being one, the Twitterverse (or whatever) being another, Reddit still yet another (with zombie resurrected content that people deleted, but it managed to scrape before that could happen, now reposted as bot-content under a thin guise of "no I'm a totally really real human, trust me bro" - plus, can you prove it, since despite you recognizing your words 100%, did you keep a copy of it, plus anyway they can trot out their legal claim to it in any case, hence whether they win or not either way you lose).

When I joined Kbin.social, I used to hold out STRONG hopes for the Fediverse. But then the former started dying, I moved to Lemmy, made the mistake of making a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, and another somewhere in Lemmygrad.ml, the feedback from which caused me to almost quit social media entirely... and now I no longer think that Lemmy will end up being very popular, i.e. burst out to include a more mainstream audience (certainly not a single person that I have recommended it to irl has anything even neutral to say about it - even programmers - and instead every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but... perhaps that's not as fun for people, especially those not used to systems-level OS management tasks i.e. those who don't use Arch btw:-D). I hope we are okay with that - definitely some people seem to prefer it that way even - but either way it is what it is. Though cross-platform aggregators like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks may hold some hope.

^This
every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but…

Are they using Reddit too? Because without blocking anything, the amount of political posts you see on Reddit is on par with here
- (1) I don't know for some of them, possibly not
  
  (2) I don't know if you've noticed but... Reddit has changed from what it used to be 😜
  
  (3) One I know uses Reddit, but argued that the niche subs over there are fine - like maybe ones dedicated to a single game. Those likely escaped much of the controversy that we over here talk about happening in the big subs. I still left mine - bc fuck spez, and more importantly what he tried to do to 3rd party app devs, plus what that means for the platform in the long run, but if we are talking "mainstream" people here... they stayed, and like it more than they don't like it. It takes all kinds, to fill a ~~world~~ social media platform.
  
  (4) "political" aside, I'm talking about extremist content, that advocates for literal murder, see e.g. some comments in here, which you may ofc argue that "it's only joking", but (a) no, it's really not, and anyway (b) that's besides the point bc it's more about how people are receiving such messages, and deciding to leave Lemmy rather than stay (more commentary here)
This really resonates with me for the most part. I hate Reddit but it’s still the best I can find, especially for non-tech interests. At the same time nothing has felt personal for such a long time. On the 00s and early 10s I had forums that were mostly for a specific topic but they grew on me so I lurked their “off topic” channels a lot. I enjoyed it and felt like I belonged. Today it all hyper-optimized for maximum engagement, no matter how meaningful or enjoyable it is. A friend lured me into threads and I finally deleted it again two weeks in or so. I see nothing by people I care about but lots of bs from MAGAs or other idiotic takes that just scream “tell them how wrong they are” at me and I can’t take it any more.
- Okay one powerful attraction of Lemmy is that here, some people are outright fucking KIND, and thoughtful, and considerate. And we can recognize their names more easily, due to the lower volume of content, and especially the lack of an algorithm pushing profits over your interests (you know that's on purpose, right? People who pay money to X have their posts promoted more highly than those who do not - your own interests be damned). Like whenever we see a comment from Lvxferre I'm excited and always anticipate good things coming:-).
  
  I gave up on that happening on Reddit a year ago - really multiple years but I stayed to help mod a couple small communities. There, thoughtful people are too often blown away by replies coming from the toxic scum, to the point where they, like me, didn't even bother trying anymore.
  
  Therefore I was going to leave Reddit anyway, no matter what happened. I did not like who it was turning me into - always defensive, always encouraged to pounce on trivial matters just to have something to talk about I guess. Imagine staying on Truth Social - you will be affected by them, you may think that you won't, but you will.
  
  Whereas here, if you block the big three (and are at least aware of Midwest.social), then you'll still need to block hundreds of trolls - but it's doable, one at a time, screetching their conservative agendas (even/especially those who label their thoughts as "leftist"). But it's manageable, unlike on Reddit where outside of the niche subs with good moderators, it's too difficult.
  
  Btw those subs may increasingly come under Huffman's control - he worships the Musk, and he'll at some point make an announcement about "we aim to provide a more consistent experience across Reddit" - and those mods will lose their ability to decide who is or is not a troll, especially when they say things that Reddit wants to keep (bc of increasing ~~profits~~ engagement). Whatever Reddit is now, just like X (though far slower it would seem), it will change.
  
  Btw you may be interested in this article: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb - this is what convinced me to leave Reddit, regardless of whether I could find a home here or not.

To other websites.
Like where we are right now.

The experience from Brazil suggests that the viable 'post-twitter' is BlueSky. So one corporate-controlled platform that starts out okay and gets steadily worse is replaced by another, and the cycle continues.

I don't think there is a viable 'post-reddit' unfortunately , because they built up their userbase at a time when people would actually want to use a link aggregator, before the experience of clicking any external links became fraught and exhausting. So now reddit has the userbase, and they have the means to host images and videos internally, and none of the bots or the lack of API or the general weirdness of the place is enough to get people to leave. Potential competitors assume that they should offer an alternative link aggregator, whereas really the only competitor is something that could magically offer a comparable userbase size.

Bluesky had the first wave of noticable spam accounts follow me this week. It's going to be interesting to see how quickly they can quell that.

It depends on how optimistic, I feel:

Very - Digg died and Reddit rose, MySpace died and Facebook rose. "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die." Reddit and Twitter are enshittifying rapidly and we are here for when people wake up.
Not very - Big Social Media has reached critical mass/achieved escape velocity and they've hoarded all the "fuel" (people) that got them there. Other places aren't going to take off like they did without hitting some unknowable level of active users and so growth is slow (if there is any growth) which creates a Catch 22 situation. It is easy to see this as all doom and gloom but the Fediverse is growing and may well wander across the threshold in which a positive feedback loop of growth starts happening at which point it seems like a viable alternative to the masses and they leave in droves putting the old places into a death spiral.
Not at all - most people just don't give a fuck how the sausage is made as long as they get enough attention and have no incentive to leave. Elon Musk good live stream himself barbecuing puppies and enough people would be able to shrug it off because they don't want to lose their few thousand followers and all the little dopamine rushes that Big Social has trained us to rely on.

Outside I hope.

IRC, duh!

Something yet worse.

Right now Discord, Slack, and other chat platforms seem to be becoming dominant. But now everything is not only locked away from the open web, but also ephemeral.

Mastodon seems to be doing pretty well and continuing to grow. Lemmy seems to have been stagnant for many months now though. I guess we're waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something again before we'll see another surge here.

we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something

Except that's already happened, multiple times - stuff has happened with mods, with bots, with server outages, with stock pricing, and more. I've seen a couple new people but server stats for Lemmy report roughly the same, and remember people will leave here too, as e.g. hopes do not materialize, and as political season in the west approaches a peak and people need a break, but apparently don't want to block, etc.

We may not even have enough people here for sustainability, much less growth. Plus I for one keep user blocking gigantic whole entire instances, which is a further limiter of content for anyone who does likewise.

So there are some major challenges facing the Fediverse, and I am no longer so hopeful for it as I was, seeing the evidence that we aren't really doing all that much to face those and attract additional users who may post high-quality content. On the other hand, seeing things like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks that will show content across multiple streams is highly encouraging, if we can see content from both Lemmy and Mastodon that way.

We all came here. If Reddit and Twitter just deleted themselves, everyone that currently uses them might also come here. Or quit the Internet. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Probably will be decided by Gen Alpha. Once interest rates come down maybe Skibidi Toilet will start a social network and that will get lots of quick attention followed by VC funding and eventually we'll all be yes-yessing each other's dum dums.

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz yolo fam, strenk whoie.

One of those words I just made up btw... but only one. Though it happened to already exist, meaning "fruit or seed of leguminous plants" fwiw.

-

Also, I lied - I made up the last two:-).

Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a "forums" tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It's not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.

Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.

Maybe to something more personally controlled, like everyone has a "server"(for feeds, "facebook", etc etc that they like to do) and connects to what ever they want.

More ease of use ofc greatly needed.

Geocities?

Anyways, that would be interesting. There coupd even be a website that indexes all the personal sites. It could even highlight interesting things from those sites. Perhaps it would even organize those interests into sub groups that you can follow and keep up to date on new information added to those sites.
- https://neocities.org/

Eventually Justin Timberlake will overpay for them

Well, I'd like to add, that most people do not use social media -almost interchangeable with internet for most folks- to interact with strangers in a reddit/discord/forum fashion... they just interact with people near them i.e. Instagram/facebook and so on.

Most people are in both of one of those and they are not going anywhere and not losing users, specially instagram.

Then you have things like twitter and tiktok, which are nor going anywhere anytime soon, yes lota of people went away from twitter, but those who stayed stayed for a reason (nazis and the hard right mostly)

So in summary, the internet, imho, at least for now, is staying right where it is.

Maybe reddit will fall, since the userbase was always more techy/quirky but they still seem to be doing fine, if your are ok with bots chatting with bots.