The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” e...
It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity.
I'm stealing the term "incellionaire".
The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.
it's been happening for longer than 20 years and; OH BOY; HOW I WISH that people could see that how this type of convincing permeates everything we see and do.
We’ve all seen what happens when social media platforms treat users as a commodity rather than a community.
Creators who built entire careers on centralized platforms, only to see their reach strangled and manipulated by "bonus" programs and algorithms.
Friends and networks erased overnight by corporate priorities and billionaire egos.
Whole communities forced into digital exile because they didn’t fit the new monetization strategy.
this has been happening since the days of bbs and icq; the only thing that has changed is the increased granularity of the scope of the wrecking balls that they unleash on their users in search of profit and the people flocking to other centralizing hubs like bluesky or even mastodon will have to repeat this history.
I find Mastodon is avoiding this problem at least so far. Pretty much all the instances are run by volunteer efforts and they're community funded, avoiding the problem with the profit motive. The federation aspect of Mastodon also makes it commercially unappealing because content doesn't propagate as easily and this makes it difficult for people to build up huge followings the way they do on centralized platforms.
My view is that Mastodon or Lemmy approach works pretty well in practice. You end up with fairly small hubs of thousands of users that can create their own social norms, and then these hubs loosely federate with each other.
I find Mastodon is avoiding this problem at least so far...
so too has bluesky... so far
my view is that social media platform enshitification is spurred on for multitudes of reasons and most of them have been around profit motives so far.
reddit began to enshitify as it grew more centralized out of a need to maintain its sizeable userbase and before their profit motive became central to their strategy; as evidenced by their multiple userbase diasporas in the last decade+ before the reddit blackout protest over api fees.
twitter, facebook, et al. have gone through similar diasporas and their expat users are centralizing around other platforms, including fediverse instances, that use their new found leverage from their equally new found majorities to take actions, like defederations, that remind us that there's always new ways to enshitify.
the fediverse's design handles well the form of enshitification that comes from profit motives; but the last 30 years proves that there's multiple forms of enshitification and i think we're going to learn new forms of enshitification from centralizing examples like mastodon or .world or .ee who will use the leverage given to them by thier relatively gargantuan userbase sizes to dictate the future trajectory of both the fediverse and the lemmyverse.
It is almost like monopolies are bad.
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- still needs a path for moderation * *
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The photo of the 5 apps, which includes the TestFlight “Loops” , sums it all up perfectly.