>>323210
Ideal to whom? I'm thinking of what kinds of platforms younger people are gravitating towards. If they want to express themselves in a public way, they go for things like Instagram or Reddit. I'm not sure how much young people are using X, or Bluesky for that matter. If they want to be more private, or rather obscure, they still use something that ties them to an identity like Discord. Maybe that's just my perception because it's more socially acceptable and easily identifiable than people using 4chan. The idea of young people choosing an altchan sounds totally ridiculous to me - the kinds that want identity would rather choose a different Discord server, and the kinds that want anonymity would just stick with 4chan. And I'm too old and out of the loop at this point to have any clue about up-and-coming platforms that young people use, which are all the result of some manufactured virality that pretty much always dies before it can reach a sustainable trajectory.
I think younger people have so much exposure and so much of an addiction to virality that a platform like an anonymous imageboard where the only attention they can expect is a bunch of (You)s isn't enough for them. If they actually want the attention, they would rather build some kind of online presence and hope they might get their 15 seconds of fame at some point.
I think the internet is seen today as a place where attention can make you a lot of money, and young people desperate to find some way to support themselves and willing to have the exposure are not going to give that up by posting anonymously. There's no cultural feed for it either, given that so many aspects of government and technology are demanding people expose everything about themselves online, the notion of privacy is entirely alien. Governments and corporations alike want people to share everything about themselves for the sake of training AI and pushing political agendas. 4chan was a lot more hip when it had a near monopoly on memes and the dissemination of internet culture, but the degree of algorithmic manipulation that takes place today across the biggest online platforms with young people means nothing sticks unless it satisfies some political message, but probably still fails to resonate with over half of people.
I've had an idea in my head for a bit of "protocols vs. platforms". A protocol would be email and a platform would be Gmail or Protonmail. I think that as the current economic situation continues to get worse, more things are going to become centralized on fewer platforms. At some point, shit has to break (though I've been waiting for that kind of moment for over a decade now), and the things that will survive are going to be the protocols, and whichever ones people gravitate towards are going to be those that are the easiest to spin up, easiest to use, and help navigate a crisis the best. I doubt anonymous imageboards are going to be the kind of thing people go for in that situation. Maybe something like Matrix servers if people are savvy enough to run and use them, but all of them are going to be way more insulated and smaller than anything 4chan was, and, of course, not particularly anonymous. It won't happen until it "needs" to happen though, just like how nobody "needed" to consider an alternative to 4chan until it started trying to suppress Gamergate.