Games

Musk has sure as hell set Twitter up to suffer quite a bit. It's a train wreck in progress, but to the uninformed layman it just looks like Musk fucking shit up with little actual blowback.

The reality of Twitter is that it's royally fucked, it's just taking a while for the debt to build up to the point where it all falls apart. I expect a complete death of the company before November 2025. Just based on the debt load that Musk saddled the company with.

Reddit showed that they don't care about their community or their volunteer mods, and lost most of the best moderators. That train wreck is coming, but might take a few years. Their IPO is coming, and they will do something that pisses off the community more when it does. I don't expect a fast death, or a complete death, but the IPO will definitely hurt more than it will help.

Meta keeps getting fined by various countries, and keeps plugging along. Their Threads app is not quite taking off, but it doesn't need to... A shit company that will likely be around for at least another decade. After that, predictions become meaningless.

Google is trying to do a web DRM to get rid of adblockers. I expect a massive EU fine in the future, and then they will quietly continue being evil. They really shouldn't have gotten rid of that motto.

I think they are. The biggest threat these companies face is not needing them. Hence the bullshit google is trying to pull around their browser. When they make dumb decisions they empower alternatives. The fediverse wouldn't be where it is right now (which is an amazing growth cycle) without these companies making dumb, self deprecating, shitty decisions. It may not be obvious, but the fediverse is something altogether different than what has come before, and empowering it even a little bit is a serious existential threat to these companies, because it represents a true, unsquashable challenge to their power structures. The fediverse represents a return to the spirit of web 1.0, with the niceties of web 2.0-3.0. I kind of hate the 'Web X.0' framing in this sense, because these things are happening concurrently.

The web 4.0 these companies are, as a cabal, trying to build is a walled garden with you as a victim to as much shit as they want to shove down your throat. The fediverse, its growth, and more importantly, its philosophical structure of open source, open access, and consent represents a kind of impurity in their walled garden that means they'll never truly be successful. Lemmy doesn't have to kill reddit. It just needs to not be killed by reddit and continue to be viable.

There may be a hard fork coming to the internet. I can see a future where open access, anonymous and private resources depart from the internet of corporations, tracking, and identity as product. With out the fediverse that wouldn't be happening (crypto sure as shit wasn't gonna get us there).

So yes, even if these companies aren't feeling particularly threatened at the moment (and I think some of them recognize the threat. I think Zuck sees it, hence threads), there is a true existential threat facing them. Its the world not needing them quite as much as they once did. It may not seem like much, but that is a huge threat to companies who are locked in a growth or die system. The fediverse on the other hand, doesn't suffer from a 'growth or die' meta-paradigm. It can grow slowly. It can have patience.

The cynical part of me agrees, but one win that could be achieved is a pervasive anti big tech culture built on a foundation of recent corporate betrayals. The more the tech companies push, the more alienated the customers. Will they keep buying? Probably. Will they stay loyal when other options arise? Probably not.