Honestly, that sounds like the most realistic outcome. If the history of the internet is anything to go by, the bubble will reach critical mass and not so much pop, as slowly deflate when something else begins to grow and take its place of hype.

Great take.

Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda

Ooof ... great way of putting it ... "brain melting AI propaganda" ... I can almost see a sci-fi short film premised on this image ... with the main scene being when a normal-ish person tries to have a conversation with a brain-melted person and we slowly see from their behaviour and language just how melted they've become.

Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human.

Yep. This is a pretty vital project in the social media space right now that, IMO, isn't getting enough attention, in part I suspect because a lot of the current movements in alternative social media are driven by millennials and X-gen nostalgic for the internet of 2014 without wanting to make something new. And so the idea of an AI-protected space doesn't really register in their minds. The problems they're solving are platform dominance, moderation and lock-in.

Worthwhile, but in all serious about 10 years too late and after the damage has been done (surely our society would be different if social media didn't go down the path it did from 2010 onward). Now what's likely at stake is the enshitification or en-slop-ification (slop = unwanted AI generated garbage) of internet content and the obscuring of quality human-made content, especially those from niche interests. Algorithms started this, which alt-social are combating, which is great.

But good community building platforms with strong privacy or "enclosing" and AI/Bot protecting mechanisms are needed now. Unfortunately, all of these clones of big-social platforms (lemmy included) are not optimised for community building and fostering. In fact, I'm not sure I see community hosting as a quality in any social media platforms at the moment apart from discord, which says a lot I think. Lemmy's private and local only communities (on the roadmap apparently) is a start, but still only a modification of the reddit model.