For the past several years as "social networking" morphed into "social media" and we saw the way it was wriggling into every corner of life, even to the point of affecting elections across the globe, I was worried more and more.

As we've sort of come to grips with the inherent flaws or evils or whatever of social media, I am expecting a time in the not too distant future where we'll look back at the social media era with contempt, disgust, and shame (if we can remember how to feel shame).

I don't really mind seeing this cycle wind down, however it does raise a question that's existed even at the height of these centralized platforms...What the hell do we use to chat with individuals online? Discord might work okay in small groups, but it's still a single company-owned platform, so those free servers aren't going to last and you'll lose that space eventually. The only big name alternatives that come to mind for decent cross-platform carrier independent chat are either owned by Meta/Facebook (Messenger/WhatsApp), or are Snapchat or Telegram.

Meta's problems are obvious to those that follow tech.

Snapchat's in a weird limbo so far as I'm aware, where it's no longer as popular as it once was, as younger demographics I think are skewing to TikTok now, and I don't know that it ever really saw wider or consistent adoption outside of those demographics. Beyond that Snapchat is just another single company desperately trying to monetize their platform as much as the rest.

Telegram's probably the most viable competitor to WhatsApp if I'm not mistaken, but the head of it & group behind it are as questionable as Meta/Facebook, at least imo.

I guess the real alternatives might be to try to set up and host one's own IRC/XMPP/Matrix servers, but...That seems impractical for small group chats, no? Or maybe it's not as costly nor cumbersome to spin up & maintain as someone not too familiar with it might think? 🤷

Edit: As to email as another option for individual comms, uhh, well all I know is that's probably the one thing you'll frequently see many self-hosting folks recommend against trying to host yourself due to major email providers by & large blocking random small self-hosted email servers.

One thing i know for sure, there ain't no predicting the future with something like this. We'll not know where we'll end up until we are there.

I don't agree with the author's conclusion. I believe that Fediverse and FOSS software will eventually become better and less daunting for users to use. They will eventually rule the social scene.

Why? Enshittification. Capitalist platforms objective is to make money. As long as that's their objective, they will always become worse. FOSS projects are truly social project where the ultimate objective is to create libre software for the sake of human connection. Money is not the ultimate leitmotiv of FOSS.