What are your predictions for social media in 2023 and beyond?
My prediction: while Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok will continue to dominate next year, social media will keep fracturing and the there will be more options for folks looking for online communities - and that’s a good thing.
There was a time - pre-2016 - when people who wanted to connect online needed to be on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family. Facebook also kept you plugged into entertainment, culture and the news. If you wanted to dig in more, there was YouTube, Twitter and eventually Instagram. (Many of the trends and news stories on those networks obviously started here on Reddit and were distributed on other networks, but that’s a different thread.)
And in fairness, those networks are still dominant - Pew reported in September that 82% of U.S. adults use YouTube; Facebook, 70%. (Reddit: 22%.)
But today, just the fact that we’re talking about these other online communities and checking them out represents a pretty significant shift. It’s been reported that there are now more than 1M MAUs on Mastodon servers, and most of those users have joined since Oct. 27. Those aren’t Facebook or Twitter numbers, obviously, but it’s noteworthy.
In the past few months I’ve spent more time on Reddit while also starting an account on a Mastodon server and joining Post. What I’ve found: Mastodon isn’t “hard” to understand, it’s just different and takes some getting used to. (Imagine your experience if you joined Facebook for the first time right now - their UX is overwhelming.) Mastodon users are your typical early adopters - technologists, activists, artists, STEM folks, educators and journalists. If that’s your community, Mastodon can be a ton of fun.
Post is still pretty quiet. Lots of folks broadcasting and distributing, not a lot of discussion. It has 610K users.
Reddit, for the most part, has been great - I’ve learned to re-love the opportunity to have more discussions like these, and I’ve spent my time here replying to or asking honest questions. Not everything’s a trap, as it can be on Facebook and Twitter.
I haven’t been on Hive or then one for news that’s in beta and whose name I can’t remember.
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