i am on whatsapp, wechat, telegram, matrix, signal, sms, irc, email, even discord...
on each of these services i am mostly in contact with real humans that i met in person.
i am in a few groups mostly made out of these same people, but also some groups where i never met anyone. i am not on facebook, mastodon or ex-twitter or any service that tries to feed me with stuff instead of just giving me a timeline of all messages shared. even on youtube i follow the channels of my choice and mostly ignore recommendations except to discover other interesting channels.
i don't see any of that going away. therefore i don't see anything changing for me
Most of the apps you mentioned are focussed on that second category, whereas (I believe) the GP was talking about the first category.
i agree that this distinction is important, but i am afraid it is a lost battle, and as we criticize the negative effects of the first category of social media we need to also point out how social media can be useful when it is in the second category.
Which is a thing that I don't think is feasible. I could be wrong, of course. But I do agree that authenticity is going to be the issue that social platforms will live or die on.
I think the next evolution of "social media" is more likely to be a return to the old-fashioned notion of interacting with people in person.
the problem is a lack of ability to recognize worthwhile content, a lack of critical consumption. there is also be a problem to find good content among the mass of junk. but that's already a problem now. i have mostly given up. i find new content mostly through HN.
the problem will be that a lot of good content will remain undiscovered.
so let me make this claim in response: the next big social media platform will be the one that will make it easy to discover actually good content as opposed to popular content.
But none of our personal experiences is a great indicator of what "most people" do.
84% of people aged 18 to 29 use at least one social media site.
That's what I mean by it not being feasible. Technically, there are many, many ways to make this happen, but they all come with very serious problems that I don't think most people would accept.
On the other hand, people accept things now that just a short time ago were considered outrageous and unacceptable by the majority of people (in the US, anyway). I maintain hope that this descent will stop at some point, and that hope is likely coloring my expectations.
But is possible that social media as source is already poisoned by Gen AI postings.
I think social media as we know it today is already at the end of the road. Our data has been obtained to make generative AI products and now we are entering a new phase of the internet. The social media we have has already been poisoned by assholes trying to make everyone addicted for money, or victims of non-kinetic warfare.
There is going to be way to many self-managing sock puppets all with an agenda. Automated psyops agents left to their devices, all talking to each other and you.
That’s not to say there won’t be sociable media, it’s just that regardless of how federated anything is we are all still going to constantly be in contact with AI.
the next big social media platform will be the one that can guarantee the most authentic human connections.
Until we get to that point, we will have what we have not and watch it get worse as smaller federated instances pop up that become selective or invite only.
Not much different then private hidden services