I've mentioned my similar thoughts in another comment on hackernews but will repeat them here.
I think ActivityPub & federation looks like promising due to cost of cloud hosting going down every year. Thus allowing self-hosting to become easy and affordable for a lot of people.
However there are other trends that need to continue for federation to succeed.
- Continued competition in cloud hosting market not just in US, but globally
- Automation & simplification of monitoring, upgrades, and security patching
- Reducing the complexity of the federation software. Mastodon and Pixelfed are great, but I feel like the feature creep can make them difficult to maintain while self-hosting. Less software complexity = less upgrades, less package dependencies, less security issues
I'm going to make a bold prediction, but I think at some point within the next 2-3 years you'll see one of the incumbent commercial social media services white-labeling their application for organizations, much in the same way Gmail, Google drive, Google docs, etc is white-labeled as G Suite. It will probably implement the necessary federation protocols (ActivityPub) and provide an on-ramp to the fediverse for those not looking to "self-host" per se.
I think ActivityPub & federation looks like promising due to cost of cloud hosting going down every year. Thus allowing self-hosting to become easy and affordable for a lot of people.
However there are other trends that need to continue for federation to succeed.
- Continued competition in cloud hosting market not just in US, but globally
- Automation & simplification of monitoring, upgrades, and security patching
- Reducing the complexity of the federation software. Mastodon and Pixelfed are great, but I feel like the feature creep can make them difficult to maintain while self-hosting. Less software complexity = less upgrades, less package dependencies, less security issues