I really started to just use Lemmy as a option b, rather than the main social media I use.
After Lemmy thankfully reached more than 50k active users, the closure of Lemm.ee is expected to lower this number by a lot.
Furthermore, I started to think about what would happen if my current instance got shutdown, as all my communities will be finished and all my activity will be useless.
The whole situation feels hopeless in social media as there is no valuable community-focused social media service to actually replace Reddit for once and for all.
The death of social media is kind of fueling the death of human to human communication.
Currently people are shopping, working, learning and enjoying with almost zero human interaction.
I am expecting a very bad event here. I predict that within the next 10-15 years, there will be a large amount of people who will finish high school without meeting a single human outside their family, that will lead to a generation which will be unable to express their feelings or talk and make relationships.
Over the long term, this is going to make the world worse.
Anyway, I just wanted to write my thoughts here.
I understand where you are coming from, but I feel the exact opposite. In my opinion, the rise of social media started the decline of real human connection.
Connection over social media is not a substitute for connection with humans in real life, but a lot of times it feels like it can be. I recently made a very deliberate effort to drastically cut back on my social media usage and instead force myself to go out and build community by participating in local groups and events. I’ve had so many good experiences and made several friends. That feels so much more valuable to me than the hours a day I used to spend doom scrolling.