Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?

  • blazera
    78•2 years ago

    Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.

    • CaptainPatent
      22•2 years ago

      For sure… Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.

      It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content… Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.

      Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.

      Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.

      • apemint
        15•2 years ago

        This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can’t even imagine at this moment in time.

        • djgb
          2•2 years ago

          The costs of the servers will crush a lot of instances. I can’t imagine the hosting costs the main kbin and lemmy instances have right now, and it’ll only go up as people join in. I think we’ll see server managers start asking for donations to cover the costs sooner and frequently. And when people don’t donate, they’ll have to resort to ads. And if an instance is really popular but barely afloat, some big fish comes along and offers to buy it from them for a decent price. Classic strategy.
          Meta may say it wants to start its own instance, but just wait until they see how most instances have refused to federate with them and they’ll be sniffing around one of the popular instances trying to buy or offering a nice package to federate. By then, users will be established and not leave immediately.

        • vanilla
          10•2 years ago

          There is nothing too complex for the ingenuity of advertisers to corrupt eventually.

        • Jaytreeman
          4•2 years ago

          Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
          This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it’s up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.

    • takeda
      24•2 years ago

      So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.

      Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo’s Twitter changes, he likely wouldn’t double down if that didn’t happen to Twitter as well.

      Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn’t even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn’t default I will get 5%?

      This actually put pressure on trash startups that don’t generate profits.

      Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It’s just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.

      Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won’t notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.

      • metaStatic
        5•2 years ago

        tl;dr: Blitzscaling only works with cheap money.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if pigboy isn’t intentionally tanking news aggregator website to screw over the investors.

      • UA_To_the_max
        9•2 years ago

        re: your side note, if I had any money in my bank account I’d be furious!

      • blazera
        1•2 years ago

        So making services worse actually makes them less trash because profits? They werent trash startups, they were made into trash corporations.

    • TacoButtPlug
      15•2 years ago

      I think it’s orchestrated. I think it’s intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There’s no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we’re in for some troubling times.