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.
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
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.
I think that word is used wrongly here. Enshittification is a specific process and not just a product getting worse.
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?
Why not both?
We have topics here, voting is private, image communities can be tiled, there are some differences in rep counting, etc.
Not better necessarily, just different. But yes, it exists alongside Lemmy. Hopefully in the future there could be many more alternatives.
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
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.
Because the FOSS crowd is always so pleasant!
breaks bottle and waves it around menacingly
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.
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.
I look at redhat differently now. Thanks.
4chan is a good example, as it technically stayed nearly the same for the past 10 years.
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.
Probably not the same kind of « enshitification », but I think the fediverse creates small communities, and sometimes, it’s difficult / impossible to find non-aggressive communities for some subjects.
It’s not really solving the issues caused by the users themselves, especially when communities are not big enough to justify big moderation teams, and those people have no incentive at all to be « kind » (it’s hit or miss I would say). Instead of 1 big community with good moderation, you can end up with many small communities with little or bad moderation.
I have no solution to propose, it’s probably inherent to the fediverse.
for some subjects.
Which subjects do you have in mind? Politics?
Not so serious subjects (I prefer to relax while being on the fediverse :) ). Anything related to Facebook / Apple / Nintendo / Disney is almost always filled with comments full of hate. It is much easier to find good communities for that on Discord for example.
See, in the past, I used a lot Twitter to keep up with news about my interests. It was easy to filter out bad users by banning them, and following more « positive » people. I left when it became « X » because I had less interactions and much more ads (probably a consequence of letting users pay to gain visibility). I hoped the fediverse would replace it.
In a sense it worked, because I get a lot of news. But now, I am worried to read the comments or even comment myself because people are most of the time not kind at all. More specific communities have not this issue, but the fediverse is so small that you are forced to be part of more general communities and face the general harsh talk of most people.
Interesting, I didn’t know Nintendo was so much hated here. I guess their very agressive business model doesn’t work in their favour.
Is it the same on more generic video games communities?
I think it’s even more common among more general communities. But even niche communities like retrogaming can be like that.
Just to give a concrete example, I have seen a post about a pretty cool mod on Zelda ocarina of time where they integrated Pikmin, it has 50+ ups, and a single comment saying they can’t wait for Nintendo to shut it down. What’s the point ? And I see this more and more. It’s not the minority but the majority of the replies I see on such posts. It’s not healthy at all.
Based on Nintendo’s past with mods, it seems reasonable to imagine they’ll do it.
I post a lot on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, I know that if it’s a Star Wars show people are going to be critical of the way the license is managed, and thé subpar quality of the recent productions.
Thankfully there are other shows that are good, but I can get the criticism against such companies. Disney recently had the backlash with the allergic person they tried to use a Disney+ contract clause against, this kind of moves can hit your image
To be fair, it’s to be expected. Because other platforms have muscle from those companies (Nintendo is basically from the land of the Yakuza, and they do behave as such towards their customers) so that commentary on their stuff in those platforms is sanitized or corporationized. On lemmy you can, for the most part, comment on how you really feel about a corporation.
I do not disagree about the fact that people are free to say what they want. It’s just that, as a user appreciating Nintendo, I am facing very negative comments on most (if not all) subjects even when Nintendo is not doing anything (like my example above about a romhack). For some people, it seems like it’s not about expressing your opinion about the subject, but your opinion about Nintendo on any subject merely mentioning Nintendo.
And it’s like that for many companies (Nintendo is just one example). As a consequence, I do not participate at all (I am just reading the news, trying to avoid the comment section). It’s not very healthy, and I hardly believe people discovering the fediverse will stay long if most messages they see are hating comments about what they like.
Yeah, currently every politics thread on the fediverse which gets any traction is hijacked by the same few trolls. Last year they were doing “DNC corruption” and “Blue MAGA.” This year they are all “Genocide Joe.” It’s insanely transparent. I get people have different opinions, but these few individuals do literally nothing on the fediverse but drop the exact same comments in every single thread which has the word “Democrats” or “Biden” or “Harris” in the title.
The mods and admins are the real risk. Not saying that they are, but they can very likely become the ones who ruin lemmy
Yeah. The blast radius for stupid is higher with more power. See: physics.
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.
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.
