The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post will be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real, authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if it's publicly accessible, it's all the same.
Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that can't be discovered (or at least are much harder to discover) by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly less young generation has moved to Discord. I'm in Discord servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...) and it's a world of difference how people act when they're neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects because an employer Googled their name.
The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and writers, is a fool's errand.
You might have good points about this usage of the deep web, but doing it on a platform like Discord is still pretty much the opposite of "avoiding Big Brother".
AFAIK Roblox relies on a centralized server for the account system and you can't play without an account. You can't put up a Roblox server on your LAN to play with friends when the Internet is down. If Roblox servers are down, no one could play. Unlike Minecraft*, Terraria, Quake, IRC, etc. When you have a Place on Roblox it's like having a page on Geocities, where Geocities could still go down and take everyone's stuff with it.
*Minecraft might need a special client to dodge the authentication issue
Discord is also very much centralized, but a sibling comment already mentioned that.
The era of big, public social media has peaked. People know better now: Big Brother is always watching, and what you post will be linked back to your real identity, maybe 10 years from now, whether you like it or not. What you post on Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, Instagram, even HN, is no longer your real, authentic self, it's an idealized self that you're marketing to someone. Decentralized/federated or centralized is irrelevant; if it's publicly accessible, it's all the same.
Social media has shifted to the world of smaller communities that can't be discovered (or at least are much harder to discover) by the outside world. The younger generation are using Roblox and Fortnite as places to hang out and meet new people. The slightly less young generation has moved to Discord. I'm in Discord servers of a variety of topics (games, music, TV, programming...) and it's a world of difference how people act when they're neither trying to ragebait to harvest likes and retweets nor stepping on eggshells to avoid ruining their job prospects because an employer Googled their name.
The internet is just too damn big now. We aren't in a world where there's space on the internet for people to give updates when the poop comes out anymore.[0] Making another social media site whose target audience is "the internet", both in terms of viewers and writers, is a fool's errand.
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre