David Pierce, writing for The Verge, is lamenting the end, so to speak, of Twitter and social media. He wants someplace else to go.

…the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.

We could go back to blogs, newsletters, and message boards. Does that sound like fun?

Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”

Fediverse is hilarious. No one wants that. At all. They want Twitter before the fascists, nutjobs, and ads came.

Mastodon is impossible to figure out even if you manage to find a server. Bluesky is still in beta with lots of people waiting around to get on.

I expect something will break the dam.