I have been on the edge with twitter and reddit for a while and I have finally deleted my accounts that I have had for a very long time there. They are no longer the places I used to know, even more so with twitter. I am ready for my new time here and on mastodon.
Hello Lemmy
I think this is going to be a trend. Centralized social media just isn’t financially viable and it’s worse for the users in so many ways. We already have alternatives for youtube, reddit, and twitter popping up. I think youtube might be the hardest to replace though because so many people view youtube as a job rather than a place to share content just for the sake of it. Hopefully with all this we can return to the good old days of the internet where a few corporations didn’t control the majority of traffic.
The problem with YouTube is the sheer amount of historical content that’ll never make it to an alternative site. I don’t think it can ever be replaced unfortunately.
As soon as everyone realizes Youtube is seriously declining everyone at c/datahoarder is gonna start archiving everything. I’m personally going to try and archive as much of my favorite channels as I can. Regardless of everyone’s efforts though there’s still gonna be so much lost content.
Another issue with YouTube is that media, especially video is vastly more resource demanding than anything mostly text based.
With something like Twitter or Reddit (as long as you don’t directly host all media) the quality and importance of each post relative to it’s resources needed don’t really matter that much.
Especially with high bitrate video footage on the other hand it does matter. So having a drive for profit somewhere in the chain does in someway help shape the system to be viable financially.
This is the problem with modern social media in general. It’s no longer about being “social,” and all about trying to make a buck. Every time someone complains on Mastodon about their “engagement,” my eyes roll.
Fortunately, corporate social media seems eager to cut its own throat: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-mark-zuckerberg-changes-facebook-social-media-tech-rcna89766
Centralized social media is as viable as any other digital media, but like many other services there’s not a lot of room for growth once you reach the plateau. This is fine for a private company, but doesn’t translate well to public or investment platforms who’s returns are based on profit growth over consistency.