Either:

• continuing to languish in obscurity with its rough-around-the-edges UX that fails to draw in anyone except self-sufficient computer savvy types who smugly proclaim they like it that way while impatiently tapping their feet and glancing at their wristwatches waiting for mainstream socials to collapse already, or
• wildly thriving, but dominated by an oligopoly of major breakout platforms that dominate the rest of the ecosystem, subtly altering it over the course of many small, tolerable nudges to the point that it hardly resemble what anyone who is currently here liked about it in the first place.

My money is on the former.

Reddit 2.0

Dead

If the major social media companies still exist by then, I think it will still be the same as it is now. Maybe a bit more users, but still a minority in the space.

Mastodon will still be the biggest fediverse service. It will remain a niche player in the microblog world, as Bluesky gradually becomes the big player by stealing users from the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The rest of the federverse will (hopefully) coalesce around fewer projects. Development is massively fragmented right now. I’m very curious to see which projects flourish, and which projects die.

I do not expect the federverse to unseat large corporate social media and become home to the masses. And I’m okay with that.

I think in five years we will just call it the Fediverse instead of giving the Zuck any claim.

I expect it won’t be that different and will remain niche for the foreseeable future. Works for me.

Either dead or a niche as it is now.

This is a bit of a long reach, but I can see it switching to ATProto, like Bluesky. The fact that identity, hosting and moderation are all done by the same person in ActivityPub is a big cause of many issues and drama on Mastodon. I think ATProto would fix it, and give access to everyone on Bluesky as well.

The same with some extra features and visually overhauled sites most likely more users though maybe a lot more but really I think nearly all of the fediverse websites need a visual upgrade they don’t look striking enough to draw you in there’s no edge there.

Usenet?

European Union regulation will probably threaten the very principles that the Fediverse functions on, potentially making Lemmy illegal anywhere in the EU because it’s not auditable enough, or doesn’t meet data retention or some kind of consumer privacy law.

The EU is a threat to the Fediverse unfortunately.

I hope more governments and institutions start self hosting their own AP publishing, at least for microblogging.

I also hope we get more multiparidgm app platforms like friendica and mbin.

Loops and Peertube are super promising, especially with peered hosting to manage bandwidth hits. It’d be smart for major creators to have a delayed archive in self or group hosted instances to help with discoverability and fight risk of content loss. Canadian Civil is paving the way.

I predict there will be more integration with tipping / patreoning platforms.

I predict there will be some ATpro features like federated identity and moderation extended into AP, or a blessed version of ATpro from the W3C’s Social Web group (Bluesky is already working on transferring ownership of the protocol to IETF). Either way apps will simply migrate or find bridges and the wider fediverse will grow.

There will be several fediverses. The ability to maintain one unified fediverse won’t hold.