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.
Copying my reply from the cross post:
Potentially, but in different ways. You could argue that mass defederation and hostility between communities are the beginning of a fediverse specific enshittification process. And instead of running out of money and then swamping platforms with ads, the big servers could run out of money or get a bored admin and instances could dissapear. Constantly dissapearing instances could also be a fediverse specific enshittification process.
Enshittification results from Capitalism. More specifically, it’s caused by corporations seeking to always increase their profitability by squeezing their customers for as much value as they can.
The very nature of the Fediverse is resistant to this for a few reasons:
- The Fediverse and most of its infrastructure is open source and copy-left licensed. This creates an immune response that always allows both devs and users to easily leave bad platforms/services for better ones. There is no vendor/provider lock-in.
- The Fediverse is distributed. Unlike centralized platforms that concentrate power and influence into smaller and smaller groups/decision makers, the Fediverse is spread wide accross thousands of servers in many different parts of the world with no centralized organization or group that controls them.
- The Fediverse is not designed for monetization. The motivation for the Fediverse is in large part, to create an open and inclusive space for communities of many kinds to connect. Most instances and projects are supported in large part or completely by donations.
The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It’s a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it.
There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts.
Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don’t want in there.
Note that all that is not a perfect safety. Capitalism corrupts everything. Email used to be considered completely distributed and impossible to coopt and yet here were are with all email going through a handful of massive corpos and everyone having to dance to their tunes to the point that running one’s own email server is all but practically impossible
The same thing that accelerated email’s consolidation may affect the fediverse as well - spam.
Very true.
The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It’s a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it. There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts. Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don’t want in there.
I really, really like this analogy. I spend my time in the online jungle!
It depends on how things go with Threads and BlueSky. If either one were to gain a significant market share of the fediverse they could capture the ActivityPub protocol and add poisonous elements to it and require anyone federating to comply.
Under normal circumstances, a fediverser could switch instances, but that entirely depends on the platform continuing to allow users to export their accounts. Unless servers stop costing money, it’s only a matter of time before the fediverse is polluted and fractured.
There’s some potential to it, but as threads is one of the most defederated instance, there’s hope that it’ll at worst go something like this:
- Instance gets big and popular.
- People running the instance get greedy and put ads on their platform.
- People slowly start to leave the instance.
- Other instances start to defederate them.
- 3 and 4 becomes so bad, the instance at best becomes an undead one, at worst it completely disappears.
I don’t think the concept of enshittification really applies to a network like the fediverse.
Enshittification happens, when companies can deliberately make their product worse for profit.
But with the fediverse, there is no single party that can just add more ads and tracking to their service (except maybe threads by meta, but this is a different story).
If the fediverse fails, then probably because it fails to attract high quality content and only gets spam and bots instead.
It can. Email is just a protocol and yet due to the our complacency it has been all but completely captured by Google and Microsoft
It would look much worse if microsoft had full control over email.
Maybe. But email is not exactly looking great these days
Since there is no clear way to monetize the platform, you can’t get enshittification as described by Cory Doctorow.
If you take a more general definition where enshittification means the platform prioritizes X behavior to the detriment of users then there might be some possibilities. For example, maybe the admins of some instance decide to push a political narrative to the point that they become widely defederated, resulting in their users being cut off from the wider Fediverse.
As I mentioned in another thread about the same topic, it’s theoretically possible but I find it unlikely. It’s hard for any single instance to consolidate too much power here; and even when we point out the fact that mastodon.social and lemmy.world are too large within their respective categories, we’re mostly pointing out to a potential future problem, not a current issue. In other words they’d need to be orders of magnitude larger to be able to enshittify their Fediverse turfs.
