(I don’t follow these things closely and could be reading everything wrong, but the power vacuum opened by Reddit and Twitter’s problems seems like it has a few wonderful potentials and many frightening ones.)
@vruba (Say more?)
It’s the same power vacuum opened when the internet killed journalism, seems to me. And that was accidental! But changed stuff enough that a lot of players prefer the new chaos, making it even harder to fix.
The difference between having two daily papers and one, in my city, is very deep — even without enormous ideological differences they each kept an eye on everything because getting scooped was so embarrassing.
And they could afford it on ads and classifieds.
@vruba Replacing Reddit is especially tough for a Masto/Twitter style platform because hashtags have proven insufficient for organizing communities around (compared to subreddits or the subfora that preceded).
@vruba what's really frustrating to me is that Reddit could have taken a decent shot at FB/Twttr if following someone included all their posts (and maybe comments?) on your TL, not just the ones targeting u/theirusername
(We could plausibly have big new social networks by the end of the year. Like, tens of millions of DAU of things we’ve never heard of today. That’s dizzying. I hope the fediverse can build the policy, culture, and UX needed to be The Thing but I worry it’s a lot likelier to be Patriot Bob’s Attention Economy and Crime Reporting App with the good-enough UI.)