Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

Forums, the fediverse, your own website, and perhaps most controversially of all, outside.

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.

All this consolidation of all the engagement to three huge platforms was never a good thing anyway

Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have.

Sure, Discord chats are great, particularly for smaller communities/IRL friends. But as an alternative to subreddits or classic forums they're absolute rubbish. Lemmy seems to be the only real game in that town for now.

Each social media giant is slowly becoming a walled garden, only allowing you to play inside, but not permitting anything out. We saw it with Facebook, now Twitter. Next up, Reddit is now disallowing any outside access without a tollgate.

Lemmy I see more like the German Schrebergarten. These are plots of land, usually not wanted by the major players, or on the outskirts of town. You get a plot portion out of this and build your garden/community out of this. There are no walls in Lemmy, but fences with gates, and you decide which other gardeners have access. There are other plots of land in other parts of the city, and you also decide which of those gardens you'll trade seeds and plants with.

I hope we'll never put up walls.

I’m not so sure this is a decline of social as much as decline in the control of large corporate interests. Lemmy is getting going well from what I can see. There will be issues but Reddit did as it grew and Twitter made the fail whale meme for their issues. The internet was pretty awesome in the 90s when none of these large companies even existed.

I actually really like this take. Maybe this is just social media growing up, becoming more focused and self aware. The fediverse is currently super rough around the edges, but it really knows what it is. That's more than can be said for pretty much any of the big social networks.

I'm so down for an open, transparent Internet with focused communities and small websites.

TikTok remains ascendent

Which is a damn shame, because it's unusable for literally anything other than sharing alienated, one-off videos. TikTok are masters at keeping people inside their app and nowhere else.

The big social media platforms made it easy to join and easy enough for your parents and friends to use even if they weren't techies. The Fediverse isn't hard to join, in the sense you can easily create an account some place, but it tends to be narrowly focused. Trying to explain to grandma that she needs to join a Mastodon instance for sewing but a different instance for knitting is going to be difficult when she can stay on Facebook and have both in one place. Something like Lemmy does help in these cases in the sense that there are multiple communities available to you from a single account. But that "everyone I know is here" feeling seems like it's going to be a thing of the past.

There’s an opportunity in this mess to re imagine the digital commons for the better. What does an online social space look like when it privileges the needs of the community over the needs of capital?

idk maybe it's just frivolous thinking, but imo since social media is corrupted by corporate profiteering brought about by venture capitalists, a social media platform that can be scaled and run very cheaply and in a decentralised fashion (think JUST text posts, all media has to be somehow hosted externally) could genuinely succeed, and be BOTH a mainstream place, while also being friendly to its users, and creating a friendly and cozy environment 🤷‍♀️

The only thing that I was worried about with the alternatives was the websites being spammed with alt right content. Reddit users are not as unhinged as YouTube comments, Facebook, twitter etc. Im glad there’s no alt right content on lemmy. So I’m pretty happy here.

Also I don’t want to have a free speech debate. If you want to post edgy shit go to twitter. For me personally its not something I like. Im not really interested in having a debate. Just personal preference

There's still Tumblr! 🥹