First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for them to die and for federated or privacy-conscious alternatives to take their place. But I don’t think they’re all dying that much.
While it is true that more people complain and leave for alternatives than before, long term it doesn’t seem like the masses are really switching yet. I feel like people are becoming more aware of privacy, market-monopoly, and other related issues, but at the same time don’t want to hand in convinience, pay money to stop it, nor move somewhere when the rest isn’t there yet. We see a spike on alternative SNS like Lemmy and Mastodon around the time news regarding some drama with big SNS releases, but we also see many users leave the alternatives after a time and that they never left the first platform that had drama to start with. They’re just used both to eventually return. It’s generally only a specific crowd that really leaves for good to go elsewhere, but not the masses.
As for the many lay-offs lately. Don’t forget that during COVID the sky was the limit for tech. They all predicted that after the time being locked in our houses doing everything remotely, we’d keep doing that, and they invested accourdingly. However, as the world opened up more that predictioned turned out wrong, causing them to have over-invested and needing to make budget cuts to fix their mistake.
blind community migrated from twitter to mastodon, most of my friends, you guessed it, are on mastodon. only my family is not, but they don’t use social media, so.
The problem is that people always have some kind of bubble when they look at their surrounding. If not because they’ve got friends with similar intrests or way of thinking, then because they interact with you. And that’s not necesarily bad, but something to be aware of when judging things in a general sense, like “is this service dying”.
For example, almost everyone I know is on Signal. However, statistically, Signal is teeny tiny in my country. Then how come everyone I know uses it? Because I do and I refuse to use WhatsApp (the by far biggest player here) so they got it to interact with me. While for SNS that trigger is less strong than for direct chats (which pretty much replaced SMS by now), people you know recommending or even talking about it mouth to mouth does do a lot, whereas a random news article or even people having to search alternatived themselves will cause way less change. The fact you mention it to your friends and family already creates a bubble.
That’s why you should look at general statistics. I don’t know about the blind community, so maybe they did switch, could be. But in general, looking at all users, while the numbers of users have dropped following their controversies, they’ve never been anywhere near dying, and most users either stuck around while trying alternatives or came back to the big tech SNS they used before. Only few left for good.
