Let's do some wild guesstimation here.
Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Let's apply that to social connections and assume that any given person only cares about interacting with 10% of any given crowd. Let's actually be even more generous and assume people are an order of magnitude pickier than that: for most people, 99% of other people are crap.
Meanwhile, Dunbar's number says that a human only cares about socializing with up to 150 people. Dunbar's number itself is kind of weird pseudoscience, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is an upper bound (or at least diminishing returns), so let's be generous and go an order of magnitude higher and say that a given person won't care about interacting with more than 1,500 specific people.
Putting these together, it suggests that being a member of a network of 1.5 million individuals ought to suffice to give anyone all the social connections they could ever want.
Of course, it took silly reasoning to arrive at this precise number, but I think there's an element of truth to it. The limits of the human ability to socialize mean that, beyond a certain point, the size of the network itself is no longer the limiting factor on the ability to find people to socialize with.
Besides the depth and stickiness of topical communities, these sites also tend to be almost universally friendly and helpful, even to n00bs and outsiders. It would be a tragedy if they were to be replaced by a one-size-fits-none platform.
In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."
The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.
In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.
The strength and weakness of Twitter was dumping "everyone" into a very flat network. Increasingly that just sets people at war with each other.
I don't know if Mastodon is the answer, but the ability to separate your posts by type would be a massive improvement. The ability to post on different servers makes it possible.
- Social network (context network)
- Social media (content network)
Every successful network will become media. Media is winner takes all. One app defines the medium and assembles the critical mass network.
Facebook is now a media app, though it started as a “network.” Networks are static. They don’t bring value as they age, so the networks always turn into media apps.
Every social media starts with a vertical, but there are no vertical social medias. Every social media started with the cohort most in need of their particular medium. Musically(Tiktok) was teens, lip-syncing and dancing. Clubhouse was tech vcs, talking shop. Instagram was artists and designers, sharing lifestyle photos.
If the medium has reached scaled (as TikTok has), there’s no way to slice it with a vertical because TikTok already has all that content, and other content you’ll like.