There is a powerful network effect to overcome here, and I don't think "being federated" is enough to overcome it for most people. Reddit and tumblr and discord offered us "what if all your forums/blogs/chatrooms were in one place" which is massively convenient, and why people flocked to those platforms. Thats a transformative user experience. being federated is transformative, but the change to the user experience -- beyond a larger barrier to entry -- is minimal. The point of mastodon is that its functionally equivalent to twitter without being centralized. But there are no decentralized places left on the internet, beyond those holdouts who are either very attached to their old technology or want to maintain their unilateral control over their platform, and who are unlikely to federate.

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 the sense that it would take over facebook or instagram? No, not a chance.

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.

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

It looks like they're going to merge

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

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.

For the general user, I don't really think so. Not unless a couple big companies run their own instances and search engines bring up specific instances to join. The barrier to entry is relatively complex compared to something that just "works"

Could it? Of course, absolutely.

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

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.

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.