I still prefer web pages, message boards, and email to communicate with far away friends. Unfortunately, almost everyone I know chooses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., instead.
Maybe Pillowfort.io might be the next big thing? Kinda like LJ but with FB/Tumblr's reblogging capability. $5 to get in under closed beta, but I like what I see so far.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens,\. I know google pulled it's news aggregation services from Spain when they did a link tax trial run, and didn't come back when said run was over. Wonder how the citizens of the EU will react if facebook decides to pull out of europe entirely?
Hmm... maybe. I'm not sure, though, because we've kind of opened this box, and I don't see web services freely letting go of so much consumer data.
From what I can tell, as of now there's no plans to sell out, since it was designed with the old school LJ fandom market in mind (to make a long story short, for basically the same seasons the AO3 fanfic archive works off donations)
I'm still betting on things like Mastodon for people with privacy concerns. Each server is run by someone you (presumably) trust, and if they break that trust, you can move servers. All the servers talk to each other. Other federated services have different layouts (Mastodon is like Twitter, Pixelfed is like Instagram, etc.). It will take a while for network effects to really catch on, but every time Facebook or Twitter does something dumb, I see user growth on the instances I have accounts. If this all sounds familiar (small social networks, admins you actually know, moderation you can begin to understand), that's because it's essentially the way things used to be--or still are, if you're here on an obscure message board.
And in the wake of news about a security breach, Facebook decides to announce that it's selling hardware which can spy on you.
Facebook is accused of inflating its video ad viewership by 900%. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...the-fact-that-no-one-watches-video-ads/?amp=1
In the past, when newspapers inflated circulation figures in order to raise ad rates, they had to pay back the advertisers. In some cases, it resulted in layoffs.
