[r3bl]

You don't jump from nothing to a global network. You host tangentially-related communities in the middle. The more of them you host, the bigger your overall numbers are.

Instagram succeeded for that same reason: profiles set to private, no real name policy, people can't look you up in a search bar. It was easier to group up in small communities. The less that's the case, the crappier the content. Instagram was ruined the moment Facebook accounts were attached to Instagram accounts — it's just dying slowly, the same way Facebook is dying slowly.

The next "global" platform is going to be Discord. It started as a place to host gaming communities. People were subscribed to a few gaming communities, so it already made sense for them to join more communities that are available on the platform. Right now, it's no longer the place exclusively for gaming. Every subreddit has one, every Patreon supporter is a member of some secret one. It'll outlast both Instagram and Facebook for one reason only: no personal info what so ever. People can't find out anything about you by clicking on your username: not your real name, not your contact info, not even a list of other communities you are a part of. You join a community by being invited to one.

[themacguffinman]

On the contrary, I think you don't jump from nothing to tangentially-related communities. The reason why niche community subreddits are so successful is because reddit itself is a global, central network that congregates users all on its own with its popular default subs. You have it the wrong way round: niche communities benefit from a global platform that funnels users to them, niche subreddits do not drive the success of the global platform in the first place (although it may enhance it).

Discord and Mastodon could never be as successful as subreddits for this reason. It's pretty difficult to establish a niche community by setting up shop next to other niche communities, niches are full of passionate people who don't spread their passion across niches thinly. You want a global platform like reddit to expose your community to the masses to unlock the niches within it.

[jammygit]

Anecdotally, most of my irl friends don’t or else barely use Facebook at this point. Lots of profiles with no pictures posted in 5 years

[jakear]

To me, Discord is just a partial implementation of Slack. What does it have that Slack doesn’t?

[r3bl]

Feature-wise, pretty much nothing, it's just targeting a different set of users. Slack started as a solution for companies and pretty much stayed there, Discord started as a solution for gamers and expanded from there.

Slack is Discord for adults, but adults are never the ones who make or break social media. It's younger people who tend to be more invested in the platform they use. It's not a rational choice (nor was Facebook for my generation), but it got kickstarted out of necessity (as a substitute to the limited chat options within games) and right now, it's the convenience that drives it further. Why switch over when, unlike Facebook or Slack, everyone you know is already using Discord?

[AJ007]

So basically what we need is Discord/Slack, but as an open protocol.

The entire concept of having a gigantic centralized social network on top of a gigantic decentralized communication platform (the internet) seems like a bit of an anti-pattern to me. Email, Usenet, and IRC seem to have never gotten the successors they deserved. Centralized, closed, and operates by a for-profit organization does not count.

As a side note I’m surprised there isn’t more mention of message boards here. Their peak seems to have been 2001-2010 and then their importance faded. One can discuss the shortcomings of phpBB and vBulletin at length, but their basic function seemed to have worked extremely well.