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.
In my opinion, enshittification occurs when, among other things, the user experience is “ruined” in order to generate profits by offering “improvements” that are nothing more than going back to previous states of the platform, only now paying or paying more.
While it could happen that some parts of the Fediverse could become Shitty, it seems impossible to me that it would happen in the whole fediverse. There’s always the option of blocking problematic instances and such. And anyway, users who enter the fediverse do so mostly fleeing from enshittification, so, I think, we are less willing to put up with that kind of bullshit and will leave sooner rather than later, maybe creating something new (and better, if possible).
I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of “more X, no matter what”. Usually that’s profit, but I don’t think it’s mandatory.
Enshittification comes from Capitalism and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, not necessarily centralization. The Fediverse eliminates the issues that lead to enshittification.
Yes. It already started with bots to get people on their shitty websites.
They claim to be useful to the site but all it is is free advertising.
For example:
Food AI Helper:
“I see you used the term ‘platform’ in your post! Here are links to platform cakes! You’re Welcome!”
I agree, it’s already happening. The Media Bias Fact Checker bot is another example. Nobody I’ve interacted with wants it, it is functionally useless and inaccurate, and appears to be a cash grab (though we can’t know for sure, because the mods refuse to openly discuss it with users). We live in a capitalist society, so even platforms like Lemmy are subject to its pressures, and require active pushback from users to prevent profits from taking precedence over user satisfaction on larger instances.
To be fair, that seems to be more of a Lemmy.world problem, which itself is one of the worst overall instances.
Have you considered moving to similar communities without the bot?
I know I usually recommend !globalnews@lemmy.zip compared to the LW world news
I just subbed, thanks. This is kind of my fundamental challenge with this platform, though. I don’t want to miss anything on the subjects I’m interested in, so I sub to every instances’ version of the same community. I’m probably doing it wrong, but if I sub to just one small sub-community because I like the mods, or the lack of bots, I feel like I’d be missing a lot of content.
Is this happening on Lemmy? I haven’t seen it
If Lemmy ever really took off things would get harder. There’s quite a few subs but people barely notice.
@5dh @fediverse Financial incentive is not the only possible cause. If project leaders stop listening to their users for some other reason, you’ll get the same result.
And there is another, more subtle problem: protocol bloat. Fediverse services are getting more and more complicated, and the cost of creating a new platform is constantly increasing. If this problem is not addressed, at some point Fediverse will start looking like a web browser market, where new players can’t compete due to an immense implementation complexity.it’s inevitable for any projects that aren’t protected by strong enough foss license. that’s how they go from open source to source available
