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.
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.
Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.
No, it’s not possible. The openness of the platform means even if one instance decides to paywall, everyone else keeps working just fine.
I don’t think it’s impossible. We should be wary, enshittification might find new ways to ruin even the fediverse. I don’t know how, and I’m not pessimistic. But we should not assume we’re safe from the phenomenon.
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
What really helps is that fediverse users are quite aware of the ideology behind federated social networks. I think, indeed, they won’t all stay on a server that is federated with Threads if it threatens the fedi network.
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.
If the number of user is someone’s top priority, wouldn’t they be using Threads directly in the first place?
I’ve never had facebook because I don’t trust them with privacy. I’ve never had an account, but they still have my name, my phone number, my address, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they can identify my face with AI.
I’m NOT signing up for them, and I feel like I’m not alone on that.
But as far as content goes, I’m a niche person. Most of my interests don’t have communities on Lemmy. But they might…if you infused 58 million new users to the mix.
But they might…if you infused 58 million new users to the mix.
It’s far, far more likely they’ll be interested in eugenicism, UN conspiranoia and the divine right of Israel, given the platform they’re “branching” from.
I’m not sure that millions of Facebook users are interested in Super Famicom Wars and G-scale trains
To be fair, if you really want to post about those in dedicated communities, Reddit is probably your best choice.
Do any of the bots that repost subreddits in Lemmy reverse and post Lemmy communities to reddit?
I’m sure Reddit would ban it if it noticed, but might be a way to attract users here for niche communities.
That doesn’t affect access to any of the Mastodon servers.
How would federation with Threads have any effect on the usability of a Mastodon instance?
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.
but this wouldn’t be the place for that.
Why not? I wanted to post about city builders the other day, I got 52 answers: https://lemmy.world/post/15279489
Someone else posted about Chrono Cross and got 19 answers: https://lemmy.world/post/20244935?scrollToComments=true
For the trains, !bricktrains@lemmy.world seems quite active, and I’m sure @Krafting@lemmy.world could consider enlarging the scope to other model trains
Last week I had to post in retrogaming, because the retropie community hasn’t had a post in 8 months.
Is that a bad thing? With 50k monthly active users, there is a limit on how niche your communities can be, it makes sense to got to more general communities sometimes. On the other side, your posts are more likely to be seen.
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.
It’s not like the current group of users is perfect either. There’s a lot of circlejerk opinions going around, and I’ve seen being get majorly downvoted for posting factual info that went against the “hivemind” opinion.
That’s going to happen in any community. All you can do about it is checking your own assumptions and providing what you see as proof yourself.
Or calling them a bunch of idiots. That won’t do any good, in a community sense, but it can be personally satisfying.
How to prevent those people from joining? I don’t think you can.
On the other hand, Reddit communities never got that terrible, right? Not all of them at least - it’s more that the platform turned to shit. Lemmy prevents that from happening. The concept of communities moderating themselves seems to work pretty well.
This pretty much. For as much as people are concerned that the “lack of UX” or the “discoverability” problems keeps people out, the important thing is it keeps normies out.
As I’ve seen before on some posts on the Fediverse discussing proprietary platforms, we all already know this. We saw FB went to shit as soon as it started allowing uneducated users.
What an incredibly elitist take. I personally think the fediverse should be welcome to everyone.
Do you choose your friends and the folks you hang out with? Of course you do. Why should it be any different in the communities you patronize?
I came here because I was tired of suffering the morons on traditional social media platforms. The Fediverse is not perfect - nothing ever is - and it has its fair share of undesirables too, but it’s much better, and I’m not looking forward to the morons following me here and making things worse. They belong to Facebook and the likes, and they should stay there.
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
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.
That’s correct. The amount of users defaulting to that instance was worrying the admins. They wanted more people to move to other servers to help de-centralize the platform and ensure lemmy.world doesn’t control the whole fediverse through sheer numbers.
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.
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.
The mods and admins are the real risk. Not saying that they are, but they can very likely become the ones who ruin lemmy
People are the same everywhere…
no comrade, lemmy vill not be enshittified, everysing for your own good
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
oh yeah truee they can fork the previous versions i almost forgot
