Fediverse enshittification
Fediverse enshittification
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.
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.
@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.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.
If Lemmy ever really took off things would get harder. There’s quite a few subs but people barely notice.
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