cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/24088740
Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?
Lemmy and Mastodon do give me the hope, that when one platform turns to shit, there will be people creating a platform that - for the time being - is not.
I think that word is used wrongly here. Enshittification is a specific process and not just a product getting worse.
its a small chance, They are open source projects so if the fediverse lets say mastdon wanted to become greedy it will be very hard for them to close source and also isnt mastodon made by a person.
Luckily due to the nature of open source being what it is, even if they did choose to close the source the last revision can just be forked and continued from there by the community akin to what happened with Emby/Jellyfin
Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.
So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.
That’s pretty much why I made my own instance: nobody can take it away from me. I can ban whichever instance I deem hostile or don’t want content from. Nobody’s taking away my API anymore or shoving ads in my face.
Nobody can pull a Reddit or Twitter on the fediverse, there will always be alternative instances to use putting pressure on the big ones to not drive away people.
Same. I loved reddit before it went to h*ll. Now I run my own PieFed instance just for myself and even if the other devs give up on the project I know it will still be there. Cause it’s mine
You can say “hill” on the internet. It’s ok.
Quick question, was your instance hard for you to setup?
A few woes at the beginning but it’s been running smoothly since. If you have experince setting up stuff in Docker and exposing them to the Internet over HTTPS, it pretty much mostly just works.
Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.
If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)
If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.
Who would enshitiffy it, and how?
Bluesky are an example of hard to implement federation, so easy to enshitiffy, but Mastodon and Sharkey are still around
No, it’s not possible. The openness of the platform means even if one instance decides to paywall, everyone else keeps working just fine.
Even if, for instance, Threads was widely allowed to federate with Mastodon servers?
Ironically Mastodon.social is still federated
https://fedipact.veganism.social/
But I guess if Threads fully federates with some Mastodon instances, people would leave those instances
Not until they are eclipsed by proprietary ActivityPub apps. Threads and Flipboard already exist.
However, there is no AP but proprietary rival to e.g. Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed (edit: there will be?) or PeerTube.
Unrelated question, how does Piefed differ from Lemmy? Is it designed to exist alongside Lemmy, or is it a better alternative somehow?
Not better necessarily, just different. But yes, it exists alongside Lemmy. Hopefully in the future there could be many more alternatives.
It won’t enshittify in the strict Doctorow sense. But it will become shittier as more people who are currently plaguing Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and making those platforms terrible discover the Fediverse and come splatter their cowpats here. That’s almost inevitable: it’s happened to just about anything that ever became popular.
Incidentally, that’s also a big part of the reason why it’s supremely important to boycott Threads and not let it federate: the Fediverse needs to grow, but it doesn’t need to grow with an influx of low-quality Facebook users.
What an incredibly elitist take. I personally think the fediverse should be welcome to everyone.
Because the FOSS crowd is always so pleasant!
I’ve only been on this platform for a little less than a year, but my guess is it will be brought down by petty infighting, not financial incentives. World and a few other instances have already decided to defederate from hexbear, and there’s enough tension between World and ml that defederation seems like a real possibility. While the goal may be a decentralized platform, the largest communities are on these two instances, and it they break apart their might not be enough content to keep new users’ interest.
Even if Lemmy gets past the infighting between the liberal Reddit refugees of World and the, “old Lemmy,”" communists of ml, users seem to tie their identity very heavily towards their instance. I’m worried that in the long term, that will drive people away from committing to cross-instance communities; even now, I hear people brag about how they’ve blocked entire instances because they’re full of, “centrists,” or, “tankies.” I think the downside of federation is that it leads to tribalism, and enough of it could kill the momentum Lemmy needs to grow.
I don’t mean to sound down on Lemmy; it’s the most interesting platform I’ve seen in years, and I’m curious to see how it develops. But at this point, I’ve abandoned Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and MySpace; I’ve learned that social media accounts are not permanent parts of your life. I’m having a lot of fun with Lemmy, but I don’t expect to be using it in 5 years.
So far being a sh.ithead is working out pretty well.
Yeah, if I were ever to switch instances, that would probably be my next move. It’s still really small, though. Green Text seems like the only decently sized community.
Fair enough, but the point is that the instance would still be cut off from a large portion of most users’ content if it were to defederate from ml or world. And while tankies and centrists libs are the schism developing right now, it seems like that’s a symptom of tribalism people have around instances, which I think could undermine the entire principle of federation in the first place.
sh.itjust.works seems to be doing well, playing nice with world, ml, hexbear, and grad, I just worry that a culture cliqueish I’ve seen so far could keep fracturing Lemmy so it can’t develop a sustainable user base. But as I said, I haven’t been on the platform that long, and this is just my guess of what Lemmy’s version of enshittification might look like after being here a short time.
There are quite a few communities outside of LW and ml:
- !android@lemdro.id
- !casualconversation@lemm.ee
- !movies@lemm.ee
- !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
- !globalnews@lemmy.zip
- !technology@lemmy.zip
Most of the instances are not going to defederate from LW, but if they were, the remaining ones would still survive
So? We’re federated.
Right, and as long as I’m wrong about petty tribalism fracturing Lemmy, that’s good. But if your insurance winds up cut off from World or ml because of petty infighting, that will be a problem
make your own instance then.
I don’t have the time or interest to do that, and it wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of tribalism that I’m concerned about.
Then abandon the platform as doomed.
Those are your options. Open one or more accounts on one or more existing instances as an ordinary user, run your own single-user instance to federate and defederate from who you want to, or GTFO.
I’ve seen people grousing about this topic since I’ve been here “uuh uuh what if too many defederations because tankies? uuh uuh…”
This happens on or to other platforms already. Either you get the “r/popularthing” vs “r/actualpopularthing” dichotomies where if you vote red you go to one and if you vote blue you go to the other, or if you’re politically extreme enough to be a problem for ad revenue you get kicked off the platform entirely and end up on the likes of Voat. Engagement algorithms already sort people into information silos, so each platform is already actually two or more that intersect only at right angles in the fifth dimension.
If pinching off the occasional Maoist or Nazi instance means I see slightly fewer reposts of the same news articles and memes everyone else reposts, I’m willing to accept those terms.
Something I think would be healthy for the Fediverse is for instances to be a bit more interest-focused rather than attempting to be general-purpose. I think that would knit a tougher non-political fabric with which to hold the fediverse together, then we can just pinch off the problematic extremists.
