@esther I can recall times, when every site had it's own phpBB script running, and a local community. Very specialized communities, with sometimes very high competencies (like engineering in specific branches). Facebook groups and successors rarely got that quality.
Maybe that is coming back again?

@esther I guess you're right. I'm curious/anxious/excited/terrified to see what's next.

This inspired thoughts for me:
We need nodes. Knotenpunkte to collect important intel from the various outputs. Maybe Newsblogs are coming back. Or something else.

@esther It's not that "everyone" waa there, but that almost any group you could define had some member there, ready to pass information either direction in the event of major happenings where it mattered.

Replicating that doesn't even need "one place"; that was just the only way to get it under a regime where platform owners actively prevent communication without joining & submitting to them. But all it needs is a shared medium people can communicate across and self-organize.

@esther maybe not every human on earth needs to use the same website, you know?

@esther
Capitalism always leads to monopolies. I hope this is different.
I personally can't understand why people remain on Twitter, if they are in the centre or left politically.

@esther It doesn't even have to be a "one size fits all" platform. I'm all for decentralized structures.

But it would be nice to channel them together somehow to make it more easily accessible. Like RSS, but for social media.

@esther Twitter was the product of unique circumstances, which we will never be able to replicate again. I mourn its loss.

@esther It was a very valuable assessment. But you seem to forget about people's interest in what's popular. Mastodon could become a new 'Temporary Twitter' once it has achieved enough popularity.

@esther Could be twitter's future depends on a radical fascistic core of 'power users' to coerce others into an uncomfortable cult-like devotion to Elon Musk, including 'loyal opposition' of dissenters, with a certain underpinning belief everything outside of his starship is certain doom because there's no air to breathe (relevance, that is, metaphorically). He's already paranoid about bots, AI, etc.--the non-living entities outside his craft--and that influences his policies. It's a bad trip.

@esther Twitter sucked. I never liked it, most people I know didn't use it. Everyone's on #TikTok now.

@esther "Under capitalism this model of the one place was always doomed to fail. It just lasted for an unusually long time due to lucky coincidences." this is a contradiction

@esther The reason Twitter was always more vulnerable than it seemed is because the value didn't require *everyone* being there. It required *enough* people being there. And there are enough people to go around, for a bunch of spaces to thrive. The One Big Place is the internet itself.

@esther This is pretty much a long version of what you're saying, with some consideration of ads, AI & profit added:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782607/social-web-public-apps-end-reddit-twitter-mastodon

@esther let s get back to the good old email listserv mailinglists
! Indepth discussions rhere decades ago...

@esther Actually community and interest-driven sites is how it used to be, then Facebook, and I guess Myspace came along and suddenly you just had to hope what you liked to talk about was popular enough. I feel like this is just going back to the older, better way.

@esther Also interesting to note that "everyone* is on the same platform" was really a phenomenon of the 2010s, it wasn't true in the 2000s (web forum/webring era) and it needn't be true in the 2020s

@esther I think you're right on the first part (no next "place to be") and hope you're right on the second part (people/community drives the way).

@esther maybe in parallel to how there will not be "the next superpower" to replace USA since the unique conditions won't occur again.

@esther the Twitter of Babel

@esther
Fragmentation is also _desirable_, isn't it? I mean, who really wants celebrities to dominate everything?

@esther Social networks are like flowers in nature. They germinate, grow, bloom, and die. This has always been the case since the early days of the internet.

The difference is when you pump a bunch of capital, marketing strategy, and media coverage into one it can grow very fast, very large, and kept lumbering about long after its natural death should have happened. Despite all these tricks nature will still take its course.

@esther Most masterful post.

@esther I wouldn't be quite so optimistic about "people can recognise the cracks". There's a lot of grifters who *want* an algorithm to game and all that bullshit, and many of them have quite a large following. About 70-80% of my tech bubble moved to Mastodon once Elon took over. But the artists and content creators I was following? And all of their followers? Nada.

@esther it's a nice dream. except, I am BEYOND tired of having 833736 chat clients installed after XMPP got defederated from both google and facebook some years back.

as much as you may wish for this decentralized hegemony of choice. I have... frankly... Had enough. It especially doesn't help that ALL but one of these stupid clients are built on electron. I die a little inside whenever I have to touch electron.

@esther a+ take and so succinct and we'll put.

@esther very well put 💯 you nailed it!

@esther People are essentially sheeple. They want to be where everyone else is. FOMO is a very strong driving force.
Logically FB should be dead and buried by now, it's a cesspit, but people still use it because they might miss out otherwise.
People will always look for and be drawn towards "the" place to be.
Blue sky, Threads, Mastodon will almost certainly not replace Twitter for this very reason.
Unless Musk actually burns it to the ground. 🤔

@esther you have a lot more faith in humanity than I do. I hope you’re right.

@esther @Bobbins definitely an interesting take but I think you dismiss too easily network effects. There always was even more friction and tension (early networks had UX that required more learning), but people dealt with it to be together.

E.g, I abhor the idea of bluesky but if several of my friends are there I might create an account while sighing in desperation.

@esther @ShmosKnows yes this

@esther
What I will miss about Twitter was the use local governments made to alert users of closed roads, detoured transit, forest fires, tsunamis, storm warnings. Mastodon is not built for that purpose.
I can find interesting people to follow here: economists, historians, civil rights activists, climate scientists, animal researchers, Rabbis, poets, map aficionados, etc,.
This place will provide many niches. We have to help build it.

@esther There wasn't even close to "everyone" on Twitter.....

It was never "the town square" despite all the talking heads who did their level best to big it up.

@esther I'm more than happy to see the "one place where everyone is" collapse.

Go back to when we had a large diverse array of sites rather than everything being dominated by one or two platforms.

Bring back sites with distinct communities.

Drop the corporate dominion over our lives.

Also, I wish every site would stop copying the Twitter layout.

The "Twitter-dominated" era of the Internet was a mistake in general, I'm sick of it, and will be glad to see it gone.

@esther
Damn it!
Now in need to enter news websites to be updated on news??
This is so 2009!

@esther if ppl want "everyone" on the same platform:

start with fedi.

then bolt on multihoming and an effective way to hide it from admins. (let's call this "opaque federation".)

(but you know nobody wants this because nobody has made it happen.)

@esther everything else would be rather creepy