Great question!

I honestly don’t know.

My best bet is that there needs to be another platform that’s roughly as big and successful as mastodon so that there’s some balance. Preferably, that second platform should be more mindful of the importance of standards and inter operation.

Lemmy/kbin and other threadiverse alternatives have potential here, especially if they can themselves work well together and get as much synergy as possible from each others efforts.

Otherwise, all the people making alternative microblogging platforms should take the job more seriously and consider banding together into an organisation that really aims to provide a stable alternative. Currently Bonfire seems to have the most promise in this regard, and with out knowing too much about them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a big deal in a year’s time, as there’s so much potential to show mastodon users that hats really possible on the fediverse outside of gargron’s influence.

At an even broader level, I hope BlueSky does well and shakes up the fediverse by showing what else can be done with a different approach. However centralised and corporatised BlueSky is relative to the fediverse, if BlueSky kinda eat the fediverse’s lunch, I think it will be mostly deserved for the simple reason that BlueSky appear to be putting UX as the first priority and decentralisation as the second. For social media, this seems like the correct approach if you want users that aren’t running Linux BTW^TM.

Even more broadly, users having conversations about the general values they want from their platforms and speaking up about them with a willingness to use their feet when the time comes is probably a net good.