I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don’t want you to leave, they don’t want you to “be done”, they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that’s part of what they sell to advertisers.

If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).

If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.

If you don’t like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).

My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:

If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.

Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.

I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.