These alternative platforms are like nicotine free cigarettes.
They might garner small communities, which is totally cool and valid, but they will never slay the giants.
One of the issues with federated anything is that there will be good servers and bad servers.
Good servers get hammered, and if you're popular you might end up perversely paying for people to watch your videos having to fund your server to maintain its performance.
This happened with mastadon, matrix and will be far worse if they want to deliver tiktoks insane performance.
Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things.
No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
Now that I'm googling for more deliberate correlations, I see other people are talking about this:
https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-an...
https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-r...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-c...
"The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates.
Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.
My parents lived in apartments.
Parents for all of human civilization and history have lived in worse.
The fastest growing populations have less money and safety nets than middle class folks.
It's the dopamine and time suck.
Men and women aren't bored and looking to fill the void and boredom with children. (Kids also can't work as free labor on the farm anymore, either, but that just adds to this argument.)
Kids keep you from nights out with the friends, dating, concerts, fortnite, girl gossip, phone time, etc.
People are choosing "I don't have time for kids (now)" and continuing with their dopamine filled lives. House purchase planning is orthogonal.
In much of the world, the most expensive real estate is apartments.
People might have the faux preference for ideal conditions, but it's an artificial mask for not having time.
Severely resource constrained people have kids. People with other things to do, don't.
How exactly the internet and the career prevented you from having kids? Have you discussed this with your partner?
We have limited time on earth, so many tend to evaluate things on how big of an impact they make or how large of a demand they satisfy.
It's okay if not everything is big, but it's also okay for people to use scale as a criteria for sizing things up.
But I don't think that's healthy for either the product or society
There's no comparison.
But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors.
To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.
Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.