Your take about users leaving is a bit optimistic. A more pessimistic view is some people may never realize or may just be too addicted to care. The reality will probably sit somewhere in between. Some people will leave, others will not.
BTW, the internet =/= shared user content. That stuff might wither, but the internet remains useful for a host of other applications: payment and shopping, file sharing, business, person to person communication, remote access, gaming, etc. Basically, any verifiable application. Which is what the internet should have been. These tech behemoths that have risen thanks to user content sharing are concocting the very poison to their own business in a race to the bottom.
BeelzebubEiNukuKoskaan@piefed.social 1 week ago
I wonder if theres going to be a split. Major platforms with all the slop, bots and ads, and then a more self hosted or volunteer ran services.
Personally I left the major platforms behind, says a lot if I say that Lemmy is the “biggest” platform I use these days (I don’t count watching YouTube without a account and never seeing the comments as using the platform in the “social” sense). Other than that, I’m on a small IRC network (we have about 150 people in total, 20-50 every day active ones and rest more or less active), same network hosts a old-timey forum, radio, git and something else that I’ve forgotten about, some of the people have Gemini capsules and stuff like that.
I much prefer the smaller place, theres less “noise” and I’m not demanded to do anything, nobody wants me to like and subscribe or watch/listen ads, nobody yells at me because I don’t subscribe to their politics 100%, nobody yells at me for asking a silly question about Linux, no. The radio has ads, but they are all jokes. Its less traffic, but I think the traffic is better quality. Like there might be days on the forum and theres no posts, there might be a few hours per day when nobody talks in the IRC, but that doesn’t bother me. Sometimes its good to not have a constant stream of stuff flying in your face.