| HN Mirror

the difference is that when you distribute control you also distribute the people and the discussions..

if instead of reddit you had thousands smaller sites\forums replacing each subreddit, that in principle achieve the same things as reddit does today, it would not have near the impact on society that reddit has..

today everyone is together in a sense participating in the same discussion and that is were the impact from social media in society comes from..

when you spread the control, you also spread the people and if you spread the people you also spread the discussions.. so instead of having one big conversation you have hundreds or even thousands of smaller ones.. and that does not have the same impact..

going even further, people tend to look for places with other like minded people, so you also end up with echo chambers where you are only exposed to the side of the conversation that you already agree with.. and very little of the other sides leak trough.. that diminishes the discussions even more.. there is no point in having a debate when the other people agree with you..

we kind of have a mix of both today happening in many fields, one in special is politics.. each side of the political spectrum have their own smaller groups acting as echo chambers to their members and it is where they coordinate but both groups also clash on the open social medias.. likely this is also happening on other places but not at the same scale..

and i am not trying to be defeatist, it is just a matter of analyzing how people behave or have behaved in the past..

people today are on the social medias they are because it is where they have being for a long time and they stay out of inertia.. add to that that those are the places where the people they want to see are as well, whatever that be friends, famous people, random content creators or whatever.. and in turn those other people are on those same social medias because that is where the people that watch then are..

so beside the inertia you also have a chicken and egg situation.. people do not move to other social media because there is no content for them to consume.. and there is no content because there is no one to consume it..

the behavior that we have seen happen for most social medias is a shift across generations, where one generation want to escape the previous one eyes and then the previous one follow.. people started on facebook, and if memory serves me right, the next generations moved to instagram to escape their parents that where on facebook, eventually the parents moved to instagram, then to snapschat and so on, now they are on tiktok and we are already seen older generations moving there as well.. likely in a few years kids then will be on the next one whatever it is and people will follow..

now, there are a few special and\or niche cases, like reddit or deviantart, but i don't see those going anywhere anytime soon, we will have to see what impact AI has on those communities, but i think it is still too soon to tell..

Another one is twitter that i consider a special case because of how people use it.. majority of people there only follow big accounts, follow news, current events, etc.. it is a place where most people only consume and even when they post it is usually only to interact with those big accounts or events..

Now.. lets imagine that twitter blow up today and be gone tomorrow, and with Elon we never know.. But if that ever happen what i think will happen at first is that people will spread out but over time they will flock back into one single platform, it could very well be bluesky, or threads, or something else entirely.. but that will happen organically over time..

and i will go as far as to say that the platforms will have very little influence on the outcome of this.. and that whoever comes on top will be mostly because they were luck and not because they did something super right and\or the other did something super wrong..

also, i believe that whoever comes next to replace twitter will face the same challenges that twitter have, regardless of how much jack want and works to avoid it, because 99% of the people just want something that works, they do not want to worry about content moderation, federation and whatever..

now, i do see people moving away from twitter in the short to medium term for a number of reasons.. it could either happen fast because it is blocked somewhere or it could happen slowly because every day people is slowly getting feed up with it.. or even a mix of both..

but the point is, some external factor is making people move.. Elon making twitter bad in some people opinion is making then want to move, if Elon had never bought Twitter then people would not be moving..

And if that move really happens then my guess is on either Bluesky or Threads coming on top, and not because of any technical aspect on those platforms but because of Jack Dorsey was behind Bluesky and Mark Zuckerberg is behind Threads and it is know that people look for what is familiar to then.. And we will end up back where we started just with a different name..

I guess i was overly simplistic when i said that it will never happen when really i meant is that it will never happen naturally.. it can happen because an external force as it has happened before.. And like i said, i do see a chance of countries starting to ban foreign controlled social media and we could very well move to a situation where each country have their own instance and those instances start being federated to each other..

I personally don't thing the tech to make that happen is friendly enough for the non technical crowd yet, but we are surely moving in that direction..