Some Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon predictions for 6 months time

Predictions are fun and social networks seem to be in a period of turbulence, excitement and of course, decline. This is what I reckon it might look like in 6 months:

Twitter will be like Facebook: cringe and irrelevant. It certainly will not be “dead”, but just like Facebook is now: Twitter will be completely void of relevance. It’ll still be useful for people to connect though. Unless Twitter sorts revenue out (repair relationships with advertisers), it’ll probably go away.

Bluesky will be much bigger and feature a lot of big accounts like celebrities, but I think they’ll also maintain a presence on Twitter too, like they do with Facebook. The federation setup will probably result in a few smaller satellites of the @ protocol, but Bluesky will almost certainly be the canonical instance and by proxy, will be the new old Twitter. I think Bluesky will still be invite only too. Third party apps will be a massive contributor to the success.

Mastodon’s growth will slow and it’ll probably resume its position as a niche community. The Fediverse will remain strong, but I think Mastodon will mostly be populated by people who really want it to work, rather than people looking for a Twitter alternative who have mostly been scared off at this point.

I’m almost certainly going to be wrong about this, but I’m quite looking forward to seeing how it all shifts. I’m gonna set a reminder to check this post in 6 months to see how wrong I was.