Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are all losing mindshare. TikTok is a Trojan horse. The others are big in tech circles and the reddit-savvy crowd, barely registering in most people's lives.
About the same as I'd count on "alternative medicine" becoming mainstream, aka 0% chance outside of fringe groups. There's a reason why those alternative social media platforms are considered "alternative".<p>If you want your social media project to be successful you need to address what's wrong with the existing ones while not introducing new problems. All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems.
I think the alternative social media is already there, but it will come with new faces like TikTok. It just delivers more dopamine per second than the model of Twitter and Mastodon. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and co will stay, but I believe they will never experience as much growth again. I think Facebook actually saw that coming and therefore it expanded a lot in growing markets and provided infrastructure. This could actually work long term for them.
I see substack gaining ground as a highbrow twitter replacement for literary, academic and journalist types of people. Possibly for tech people as well but they tend to make their own circles. It won't take off as much among the general populace because of the 'read? ew' reaction that is unfortunately too common nowadays.<p>They need to put in some kind of proper microblogging service though rather than just the chat feature.
decentralized social media is an oxymoron. We had it, before facebook we had forums and blogs and irc and other disconnected identities (and it was great). We led multiple parallel lives. The purpose of social media was to tie everything in a single identity , which naturally lends to centralized behemoths.<p>How about we let the social media paradigm die ?