What always helped centralized social was an environment of rapid growth. For the majority of people there wasn’t a “before” to compare to whatever they signed up to, so a play like the one Reddit made, which isn’t about the quality of the content but “whatever gets people in the door”, worked - focusing all your energy on hypergrowth was the Web 2.0 strategy. But my own “before” goes back to browsing Usenet over a dial-up shell account(terminal access only). The technology used then was primarily characterized by being efficient to store and process, which led to a federated model that shared text threads.
The reason people switched from Usenet to early web forums was also a combination of not having a “before”, plus some new conveniences. Usenet moderation tools were very limited, ensuring that spam and derangement were common. Because the design was made just for text, you didn’t have image-focused content, but you also didn’t experience the things images get moderated for now - you could post a UU-encoded file that contained an image, or a link to an image, but you couldn’t shove it in people’s face. And tree quoting replies was normalized, if rather disorganized - long-running threads often got “forked”.
The model of web forums that became most popular - flat topic threads, more images, centralized moderation - caused as many issues as it solved. Flat threading with no post ranking makes people reply “first” at the top of the thread, images create a whole attack surface, and centralized mods have more power to trip on. But they could provide a better experience along the narrow set of things they wanted the forum to be about, and that made all the difference. That’s how the centralized model works. When I think of places like Something Awful or Newgrounds in their original heyday - it’s really gatekeepy stuff. There were tastemakers and you followed their lead or else.
Reddit started with a lot of link aggregation, which was also Digg’s thing - that model “pushes” more content than a regular forum, so it helps build broad-audience engagement. But Reddit added more Usenet-like elements, and those gradually took over a lot of the niches as more people started using Reddit to ask questions and make statements addressing a specific community.
Something that I think defines the federated space is that there is less “push”. The power is more distributed, fewer gates to keep. Reddit represented those values for a while, and now it obviously doesn’t, so the users who were there for that are going to drift this way very quickly.
Not dead, just sleeping. It’s a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:
Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.
And that’s it. You don’t have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can’t solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone’s database and hoping nothing happens or they’re too big to fail. It’s just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.