Not sure if it's the solution, but definitely a viable alternative to social media, not just for privacy enthusiasts.

I think you're on to something. I'm all in on the Fediverse. I still have some legacy stuff on traditional social, but I spend most of my time here. Though I have to admit I love me some LinkedIn.

in long term, yes

but we will have to improve it a lot before it becomes so easy that even the most smoothbrained individuals can use it

No I don't think it will. I would be shocked if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc etc ever truly went away. If people remain dedicated to improving and promoting the fediverse it could carve out it's own space in the social media landscape. And once that happens you never know what the future holds. But I'd be surprised if it took over everything in the space

No it turns the problem from your account being owned by a company looking to turn a profit to random people on the internet. If we had a way of downloading our accounts and transferring instances then maybe.

It looks like they're going to merge

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub

No. While it's not that complicated it is still more complicated than current social media. People won't like that.

I don’t think it will replace it, but I do think that it will create a place for a niche group of conscious folks to build a community without the capitalistic aspects of life that have ruined a vast portion of the internet.

We just need to be sure to keep perspective and be ready to support and our server admins/developers. The lack of big tech funding is what could potentially hurt us here in the fediverse. Nothing is free and it’s on us to pay our own way before advertising starts to creep in.

I don’t believe that it will replace it but that is maybe a good thing. I’d be Ok with fediverse staying in niche with active user base, because once it’s mainstream it’s gonna attract corporations to enshittificate it like they did it with Twitter or Reddit.

And I’d be cautious with “Internet is flawed”, it’s for us more conscious users but for vast majority of people Internet unfortunately is fine.

The federation aspect of it has to be invisible to the user. The user shouldn't have to pick an instance (unless they want to) and they should see communities from all instances by default. Also we need a discovery algorithm. That's the most needed feature.

Could it? Of course, absolutely.

Will it? Well, that's a much more complicated question, with a much more pessimistic answer.

As long as a hardware will be sold with microsoft/google/twitter/facebook by default, no chance fediverse replace all these well-established applications. BUT it's not a problem for me : i use what i like, open-source, and i let other use what they want.

Yes, I think so. It could. Is it likely to happen? No!

I see a distributed architecture central to have a “public space” online that works in the long term. The communication infrastructure shouldn't be controlled by any single party.

However the way people work and the way capitalism works, it's utterly difficult for something like ActivityPub to become the standard. F**book joining in frightens and encourages me at the same time.