Social Media as we know it is non-viable in a world of troll armies, AI slop and spam, and professional propaganda. I give it less than 10 years to live.

The future is private enclaves like Discord, Slack, private networks, private forums, and chat apps. The open Internet is a dark forest.

The future for the people able to break free, sure, but I believe that'll always be a minority of the population.

However, even the private enclaves become corrupted over time, especially if they ever grow in popularity. I mean, look at HN as an example. What was once a niche place for tech people and STEM related topics, now any given day the front page is 30% pure sociopolitical content, 50-75% mainstream media content; comment threads full of partisan rage baiting and emotion-driven debate.

Also, once a niche place becomes in any way important/popular, the propagandists will swoop in and work their tricks to start controlling the messaging on it.

At this point I'm feeling that niche places can only exist long-term as long as they have some sort of dictatorial control by a truly moral admin, who forcefully keeps the community in check by viciously moderating content. Of course, such a person is eventually corruptible, and finding a successor later for such a person is its own issue.

Remembering from where we came, a decade ago, and where we are now with social media it makes me sooo sad

But I think it is true, private or moderated groups might be the only safe place.

If social media is really a representative view on our society, i feel quite disappointed

> The open Internet is a dark forest.

Could you expand on this a bit? That sounds like potentially interesting idea. Especially since I read “The Dark Forest”.

BlueSky seems like it is the viable exit from the dark forest, by virtue of the network being open data.

It's not clear right now what tools we'll build to analyze users & subnetworks, to try to get a pulse for what is authentic versus propoganda. But I am 100% here in large part because it's the only network where the data will be available! Where there is a strong commitment & the protocol is designed to making the firehose/backfill readily available. And with that I think humanity stands some kind of chance of engineering defense against the Dark Forest, can reach up towards some exaltant connection.

The Fediverse is much more focused on small communities (which personally I think it mostly fails to do usefully) and has an ethos that strongly rejects search / findability / data-gathering / network monitoring. There's little hope for me if that's the outlook: limited networking. For it means no defense, no higher views. Big Social is of course now totally inaccessible, as dark as it comes, with academic research having been buried by massively expensive API access costs, brutally short retention limits, and utterly opaque ranking/moderation systems.