[lapcat]

> All existing large social media platforms of today use one or more (if not all) of the above methods to incentivize users to consume, engage, and create content on the app — and that’s been the state of the social web for the past ~30 years.

I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.

All existing large social media platforms of today are for-profit. Moreover, being large, they require large amounts of capital. Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification, which is why all large social media platforms have followed this pattern for the past ~30 years, even if they started with good intentions and user friendliness. What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?

Unfortunately, it appears that social media platforms are not the type of product that many users are willing to spend money for, thereby maintaining some level of respect for the users. If the product is not free, it won't become "large". Several platforms, including Twitter/X (and remember ADN?), have tried and mostly failed to promote subscription funding. As the old saying goes, if you're not the customer, you're the product.

[eggbrain]

> I guess we have to assume that Mastodon is not "large" by the author's definition.

It's a fair point that Mastadon was left out, and yet it does tackle some of the problems I mention -- perhaps worth a followup post. That being said, I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.

> Practically speaking, the existence of a large social media platform requires investors seeking unlimited growth, and that's the predictable recipe for enshittification [...] What's the author's escape route to avoid this trap?

I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here -- it grew fairly slowly compared to other social media platforms, but now feels like it has quite a lot of staying power (although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify).

That being said, I think a lot of problems I mention can be solved just by giving the customer (e.g. the user on the social media platform) more choice. Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

The day old.reddit.com goes away is the day the site dies...

[immibis]

Has it not already? It's like 90% LLM bots and it bans anyone who says anything of value.

[sigmaisaletter]

> I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.

Care to give an argument to substantiate that? These are pretty strong claims, "in the end" and "always" have a certain finality to them, which indicates you very strongly believe that. Why?

[eggbrain]

> Care to give an argument to substantiate that?

Because eventually bad actors take any decentralized platform / standard and ruin it for the rest of us, leading us to trust the few good players that remain (see: email). Sure, technically you can spin up your own mail server -- but because of the copious amount of spam from people who have done that in the past, you'll go through so many hoops that eventually you'll throw in the towel and probably use GSuite or a known major provider.

As Ben Thompson says:

> [...] centralization is a second order effect of decentralization: when all constraints on content are removed, more power than ever accrues to the entity that is the preferred choice for navigating that content.

[lapcat]

> I feel like federated social media platforms are not going to be the answer in the end -- and although its adoption has grown in the coming years, I think it's always going to lag behind others.

Agreed, although as a user that doesn't bother me. I'm satisfied with Mastodon's current size.

> I think reddit, to some extent, can be considered a success story here

I've never considered Reddit to be particularly "social". I'm a daily Reddit user, but I don't have any friends on Reddit. Maybe I'm using it wrong? Unlike some other Hacker News commenters, I don't have a particularly high opinion about the level of discourse on HN, but still, in general it seems well above many areas of Reddit. (Of course that depends crucially on the subreddit.) I think that downvoting, for example (which exists on Reddit and HN), is an inherently hostile, nonfriendly action that's not conducive to being social.

> although as it approached its IPO it did indeed start to enshittify

For example, killing third-party Reddit clients that users loved.

> Imagine you had a platform that asked you how you wanted to pay to use it: with your data, with advertisements, or with a membership of $XXX/month, amongst other options.

Well, X basically has that now. I find it interesting that the "Premium" subscription is only "Half Ads", whereas a Premium+ subscription for $395 per year, out of the price range of most users, is required to be "Fully ad-free", which is still a bit of a lie, because it comes "with occasional branded content in less common areas." The problem is that unless a service is fully funded by subscriptions, the advertisers are still going to make severe demands on the service, and the advertisers don't like it when the service removes user eyeballs from their ads.