So some time in the near future, maybe a decade from now, maybe less, maybe more, two things are going to happen: 

1) The current mainstream of social media infrastructure is going to dry up and end. The snakes eating their own tails are not going to last for much longer, and we are going to see our current gold standards go the exact way of MySpace. And, 

2) New models that can handle the unrest, disdain, and dropping retention of our current platforms are going to replace what we currently have, and we're probably not going to understand the real nature of what that entails until it's already being adopted by the mainstream. 

There is, however, an opportunity that arises almost exclusively in the interim. 

During vast shifts in the paradigm of internet structure, alternative ispaces start to crop up. On the fringe side of the mainstream, there are things like Reddit and Discord that deviate somewhat from the main mould of most profit. For awhile, fandom communities had things like Tumblr, which took the mainstream model and reworked it to do something different, and AO3 and Wattpad, which provided for diverse niches and self-governed in vastly different ways to things like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. These corner-world outskirts ended up keeping more features of the first wave than the big platforms did, partly due to a difference in goals. Namely, "The Almighty Dollar Sign". 

But keep going deeper down the rabbit hole, and you keep finding minor deviations cropping up here and there, although those don't often amount to much of what we're going to need in coming times. 

A lot of people have posited winding diatribes on the evils and sicknesses of our modern social infrastructure. Not a lot of people have put work forth towards addressing the issues they spout off endlessly for the purposes of content. Hey, wait, go back-

A lot of people have posited winding diatribes on the evils and sicknesses of CONTENT. Which, we can't do anything about, due to it being an abstract concept that is inherent to neurological life itself. CONTENT™ does, however, find itself followed by the burden of purpose. Every effect has some, however arbitrary, cause, so if you're really down with the cause, surely you'll have an effect? Right. 

How about this: why didn't this happen with books? 

Did this happen with books? 

Back in the day: 

• Somebody takes the time to write a complete and very well thought out book, probably with a name attached to it, and there's a decent chance that the author of that book can be found and potentially contacted by way of that name; 

• Somebody else takes that book, makes a lot of copies, and distributes those copies to any number of localized centers of text repository; 

• People who are interested in reading this book then seek out the book from either one of these local text repositories, or from somebody else who has done so; 

• You actually read the book, and process the likeliest meaning, intent, and calls to action contained in that book; 

• You probably discuss the book with somebody who knows where you live, if only in a broad sense, or else you just pretend you've never seen that book in your life; 

• And just maybe, you are so inspired by something inside that transpired because of this book, that you set out to write one yourself. 

Granted, there are other systems of text that are far more leniant in their gatekeeping. You might have written for your scholastic institution's student newspaper. You might have released papers with the incomprehensible manifesto of a madman desperately seeking the truth from atop a roof in a major urban center. At the end of the day, we can mostly stick with a lax specification of the aforementioned process. You write, then you carefully consider what you wrote, then you publish, then your writing is read and carefully considered, maybe to the end that someone may write again. 

Then radio television came around. 

Most of the problems that arose out of TV were not consitent with the paranoias and cautious conceptions of the day. Consequently, they were mostly misaddressed, or just not addressed at all. 

The main problem around television turns out to be something that usually worked perfectly fine with radio: 

you are talking at the same time that you are considering what you are saying, while being heard, where nobody hearing you has any time to consider what you are saying once you have already said it, because there is more coming that needs to be processed. 

Humans did not evolve to have conversations, in real time, with people they did not have any idea might have existed. Humans did not evolve to really be around more than one village of other humans at a given time, and any information that came about in that village had to go through any number of other humans before connecting the originator and some random person who was not there for the information's grand inception. And now, we are all connected to practically every other human on the planet as if they standing directly behind us, with a butcher's knife, and a very large grin. This is the new normal, and if we want to not feel like we're being chased by the antagonist of a slasher movie, we have to either sit in a corner with our back to the wall, or either go live under a rock, buried in sand, presumably not far from a pineapple under the sea. 

In summation, we went from alternating between two diligently stable and comfortably controlled phases with which we mass-communicated, to the battleground for a calamitous chaos of everybody talking at once. 

People want desperately to control each other. This partly comes from realizing we can control the world around us to make it as we see fit with tools and such, and partly from habits that sprung out of the assumption that anybody who should be in control of the world would have to be pretty knowledgeable about the world in order to outsmart everyone else in it. Unfortunately, people tend to have this thing called "Being A Person" which makes it accessibly easy for an emotionally callous and immature person to do something like call another person stupid for not doing what the immature person wants, and since that hurts like hell, the second person will convince themselves that's it's true, that they are stupid, and therefore, undeserving of the application of autonomous choice, so that they can forcefully stop themselves from doing anything they were not told to do by means of self-reinforced fear and shaming. This leads to things like kings, kidnapping, world domination, class policing, computers, and poor people, especially with the advent of bill receipt money, so that people seeking to be made mentally and financially whole again didn't have to duel to the death for each other's gold and satisfaction, and could instead relegate their feuds to the domains of monarchs, lawyers, and nefarious politicians. 

Naturally, this instinct becomes the process of a whole species trying to make itself act as one homogenous goo, and the societal pressures of conformity and intellectual sanitation are set. 

And then all of the sudden, 

Cats and dogs living together-- mass hysteria. 

The Beauty Of The Baud. 

No peer review. No concern for the greater good. No dignity, no respect. No faces, no names, no authors, no people, just data--being shifted around. Most importantly, no distance between us. We remember the Freeman. No false veil of time or space may intervene. 

We are, as it stands, maximally connected. At this point, the way things are heading, we might be headed directly toward some state of mass shared consciousness, to the point that our very thoughts can control each other. Now, if you wanna live forever, that's great, man. If you want to make good decisions, and take a second to question the safety and validity of all that, well that's cool too. 

Companies that make real profit off of internet services tend to rely on the impulses of people, as well as a lack of better known options. Here, first, is what we can directly do about that: 

• Devise new infrastructure that does not rely on the motivation of deep-pocketed controllers to function, and that may thrive on its existence alone
  
  Practically, this looks like freely open software, community maintained and peer-reviewed resource bases, decentralized distribution networks (look up how the BitTorrent architecture works, it's a fascinating read), discrete and plain-sight-hidden reappropriation of free-to-use mass corporate infrastructure to build obfuscated and highly redundant underground networks, and chiefly: working to band together, train, and educate people to help build these new systems. While I'm at it, 

• Community outreach and organization: work to develop localized bases of collaborators and resistors, at every level possible. Whether you are at school, at work, at home, on a date, incarcerated, in a shared purgatory, or cast away at sea with nothing but a Wilson ball, start discussions with people about how you can better organize around you to bring together people willing to work on creating a better tomorrow.
  
  Develop communication and support networks that aren't able to be monitored by outside actors, draft collaborative codes of conduct and subunit organizational protocols and procedures for launching new projects or getting constructive input in a discussion, foster transparency without losing privacy as a cost, encourage your friends and loved ones to speak up when something feels wrong, even if it's when you yourself might have messed up.
  
  Keep cognizant track of systems and actors of private interests that have a stake in maintaining what you're trying to fight against. Keep plans and strategies ready for when at every point of resistance you will be met with resistance, and develop applications that readily assist in that, that everybody affected can easily access and comprehend.
  
  Start local. Seriously. A strong shared condition and confinement has, throughout the entirety of our history, produced the most effective, tightly knit, and genuinely impactful presences in every group or social movement to exist. You need to be able to mobilize force through your city and your physical spaces shared. Don't fall for an instant feedback loop telling you it's strong, because it will snap and fall at a moment's notice to leave you completely alone. 

• Seize control of the systems that powerful entities are not in any position to withhold. These things can change at a moment's notice, so stay diligent of new developments and advancements. Look to anywhere with a state change. 
  
  Take Google for example:
  Google's GSuite offers Sites Hosting, Apps Script Extensions, Spreadsheet Tools, and Form Submission Tools, and YouTube provides free private video storage, as well as a somewhat permissive library of content accessible from most places in the world to some degree. What this translates to is: static website hosting with full-page HTML/JavaScript embeds that can use the Fetch() API to send HTTP requests from a local computer, as well as Database storage that can be made publicly readable, and a command-processing server between Forms and Apps Scripts that can process data with Google's computing power and modify Spreadsheet cells (Database), and a free storage repository that can be made to store arbitrary data encoded well enough that lossy compression does not compromise it.
  
  Whatever the next wave of mainstream social media turns out to be, Google's gonna have a hand in it. They're not going away any time soon, and their weapons are only getting sharper: AI. Keep an eye out for any way to use their own systems against their and others' global raving crusade. 

Before we can take on an offense on whatever the next new media system is quietly congealing into right now, we're gonna need to understand a preventative angle. 

First, an overreview! 

The purpose of a company is to make money. Companies make money by somebody giving them money. Sometimes this is a person buying something directly from the company, or sometimes this is an advertiser buying a contract that their ads will be shown to the company's consumers, and these advertisers make darn sure the ads work at least a little bit. Often, an advertisement succeeds at selling to consumers purely by manipulation of the world those consumers inhabit, which previously did not need the product they were selling. For our purposes, let's assume this is bad. Sometimes, a company will succeed at selling a product for more than it takes to deliver the product and properly compensate all parties involved in working for that product to be delivered, and may even keep all that extra money at the topmost management levels, or even withhold proper compensation from some workers. For our purposes, let's assume this is bad. 

Social media platforms are pretty much only possible due to the efforts of companies, as the infrastructure required to run them costs a lot of money, and that is only worth it if you can: a) afford it, AND b) make more money than you started with by operating this social media platform. They make money somehow, but most of the time they are not selling you a product. Thus is the distinction of goods and services. 

Demanding profit in order to exist and continue so, social media platforms employ the contract of advertisers. Being that, if you are not making the most money you could possibly make, you could be making more money, and that the purpose of a company is to make money, the companies that make the most money (and therein accrue the most control) are the companies that make sure there is the most money to make, as is the unifying scripture of capital. Consequently, these companies will cram the most advertisements in your face that they can fit on a page. 

But there's a problem! People do not want to see advertisements. A company's solution to this is to offer you a paid option in which you can use their service without encountering ads. An actually real person's solution to this is to install an ad-blocker, which means the company can't sell ads anymore. Naturally, any sufficiently savvy and equally litigious corporation will try to kidnap ad-blockers in the dead of night and ensure that they're never again seen or heard from. And there's another problem! The majority of advertisements you see are made by corporations, and companies are not above trying to scam the elderly, or enable the actions of horrible, horrible people, if it means they can make a buck. 

Since social media platforms want to show you the most ads they can, they will also attempt to engross you for as long as they can. Their main method of doing this turns out to be captivating you with any little sense of human connection, even when it's wildly false. They use people as objects and factories to churn out CONTENT™ and feel validated as a "functioning member of society", and can even get a small kickback for their efforts in some cases to incentivize the growth and heightened retention of the platform. 

To recap: Industry rule #4080, "Record company people are shady"
Uh. Wrong one. But you get the point. 

People need a feeling of connection, and social media platforms are happily prepared to capitalize. Even at grim and tragic costs. So long as their image does not become liability. 

We need a few things. 

 1) We need to be okay, and emphatically physically safe, without constant stream of human facsimile projected upon the face. 

We can't just let ourselves be dependent on technology to function as persons. A large degree of technology is never really going to go away in our time, but we have to build things outside of social media to allow us to be together without living in a societal freaking Thunderdome. It's too much strain for nominal gain. 

 2) We need lawyers. 

Whatever we try to create is going to be met with systemically backed opposition, and we need people who know how to fight in these warzones and climates. Legal counsel is going to invariably be central to that. 

 3) We need hackers. 

Not just the kind that can infiltrate a private computer system, I am legally opting to not acknowledge them here. What we need is the kind of people who think about how things work, and can figure out creative and perceptive ways to wrangle them for what we need. We need engineers, inventors, visionaries, and dreamers. People who not only have the knowledge, but can wield it, and bend it into a thousand forms in an instant. 

 4) We need an informed and consciously cognizant user base. 

And we need to ensure this systematically, from the ground level up. There's no room for reactionaries, there's no room for the emotionally immature and pathologically controlling. This needs a system that maintains its own stability, and fosters its own health. This is likely going to be the hardest part of the process, and it is fittingly the most imperative. We need Real Thinkers here, and we need an angle we haven't yet seen of the world. 

 5) We need timing. A lot of it. 

None of this is going to happen overnight. We need to be proactive to an absolute extreme, and we need to organize with the precision and accuracy of an armed forces unit. Humanity is fighting a war against the rugged individualist, and getting its behind severely mangled. There is absolutely no time here for being polite, for avoiding conflict, for wasting on mindless debate, or for spiraling. As far as I'm concerned, at the moment you read this, you have been irrevocably called to action. Not tomorrow, not later today; right now. Start brainstorming, start organizing, and for the love of all that is good just delete your Twitter account. It's not even a Twitter account anymore. You are no longer a consumer, you must now transform into an agent and staunch activist. 

All music is political, and all music is personal. Speak your mind in your music, and truth to the people, and don't expect it to be a replacement for most anything meaningful. At the bare minimum, streaming services will not allow for a base based in revolt. Maybe it'll work locally, but kids these days are not bumping Dead Prez, they are poorly singing along to Drake.