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.
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
Maybe, but threads userbase would swallow mastodons whole, that you wouldn’t notice. Facebook has something like 58 million people. Mastodon I think has 12 million people, including the recent brazil exodus.
So if that happened, even if every mastodon user were on that one instance, you’d still have a potential growth of 46 million new users.
I think it’s inevitable that enshitification will happen. In fact, we haven’t risen above the shit stage yet.
You’re talking about going downhill, whereas I don’t think it’s gone uphill yet. There’s so few users, that I run through content in about 30ish minutes.
Whereas for as much shit as you’ll talk about reddit, they have infinately more content. I cannot remember EVER running out of content when I was on reddit.
Last night I wanted to talk to people who enjoy the advance wars series. I started playing super famicom wars. And I wanted to post about it. Until I realized this isn’t reddit. There is no community for that here. It’s too niche, and theres no users to support that community. Even if I created it, it would just be 1 community, with like 1 post by me, and 5 subscribers.
Until this place gains millions of users, you can’t talk about enshitification, because we’re already there.
Unless you come here exclusively to talk about linux. In which case, yeah. Good luck with your platform that is currently 30+ years old, and enjoying an all time high userbase of less than 5% despite windows being a dumpster fire, and macs costing more than a house in an economy where everybody lives paycheck to paycheck and will for the rest of their life. They’d rather deal with apple or microsoft than linux, simply because of what linux is.
If thats what you’re here for, than sure. For everybody else, this place feels like it’s continually LOSING users.
There is no community for that here
If you open a advance wars or super Famicom wars thread on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works and !retrogaming@lemmy.world I’m pretty sure you’ll get a lot of answers.
Everytime I post on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works I get dozens of answers
Also
- !gardening@lemmy.world
- !inktober@sh.itjust.works
- !foodporn@lemmy.world
- !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
There’s more than Linux
That is such a disorganized way to do things. Retrogaming is about retro gaming as a whole, not individual games. I’m sure there may be a few people who enjoy it, but a dedicated community would be where you should be wanting to post.
Besides, I didn’t have questions. I just started playing Super Famicom Wars, and wanted to talk about it. See if others have played the fan translation I am. I get super excited about topics, and I want to share…but this wouldn’t be the place for that.
And this happens usually once or twice a day. I want to post about (topic) but (topic) doesn’t have a community people would search to find that kind of content.
Last week it was G-Scale trains. I see a general model train community, but it’s mostly dead. And certainly they wouldn’t want to discuss G-Scale.
Last week I had to post in retrogaming, because the retropie community hasn’t had a post in 8 months.
The fediverse needs people, and content to grow. I feel like it’s even slightly shrinking.
The fediverse’s decentralization is meant to circumvent this possibility. It’s all too easy to ignore one or two bad instances if it comes to that. No matter how big they get. It’s part of the reason you don’t see the lemmy.world instance in the lemmy server browser. It forces people to spread across the instances more instead of lemmy.world taking the direction of the fediverse wherever they see fit due to how many users they have. As long as the admins continue to respect this viewpoint, enshittifcation of the Fediverse will be postponed.
It’s part of the reason you don’t see the lemmy.world instance in the lemmy server browser.
On join-lemmy.org you mean? I didn’t know that, but that’s great to see. Lemmy.world has become pretty big.
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
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.
I like how old farts are just old farts because they’re old. Young people are still farts too. They’re just young farts, and will eventually be old farts. And the old farts of today, will eventually be dead farts.
We’re all just farts. All in a fart vacume.
Just farting our way through life.
I’d say that it’s possible but extremely unlikely. Acc. to Doctorow enshittification requires three things:
- “Consolidation” - i.e. the corporation gets too big and powerful
- “Unrestricted twiddling for them” - i.e. using power to prevent being legislated on.
- “Total ban on twiddling for us” - i.e. enforcing the legislation to prevent competition.
The Fediverse is designed in a way that it’s more resistant to #2, as inter-operability decreases the cost of switch for users - if you see an entity (person, corporation, group, whatever) twiddling too much it’s relatively painless to pack your things and leave.
However, I believe that if an instance consolidated so much power in #1 that it’s enable to enforce an “it’s me or them” on the users, even the Fediverse could be enshittified. And by “so much power” I don’t mean something like Lemmy World, I mean a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the rest.
