I don’t know. As a fan of the genre there seems to be renewed interest from some very grass roots developers. I would have agreed with your take in 2020, but in 2023 we have announcements of:

• the Riot MMO
• Ashes of Creation
• The Ghost studios MMO

These are all still in development, some still in the very early stages. But I would say there appears to be renewed interest in the genre by developers. These projects are major investments by industry veterans. There is more hope for a major new game.now than there has been in the last decade.

https://youtube.com/shorts/WwbqlHkQQsE?si=iLsOjGmXc3T8d_fj

At minimum someone has in a traffic fatality.

Given the work by the guys behind podcasting 2.0 it would be interesting to see the fediverae adopt boosts backed by sats / the lightning network. It seems like they solve a lot of the same problems. You need a common currency people can freely transfer in small amounts to support content they like and the infra they are hosted on.

Here is an article by one of my favorite podcasts that have gone all in on boosts.

And here they were saying the private subreddits were causing usability issues…

The admins, not to be out done, have now just broken search links and user experience for the whole rest of the site. Not just for the private subreddits.

I can take my browsing somewhere else, but the biggest casualty of reddit’s implosion for me will be the years of help posts in hardware and Linux focused subs.