how?
One answer is IPO. Reddit took a nosedive so hard that it made the Titanic look like a fantasy.
My main take is; no down votes without a comment is my take. If you don’t like my opinion, tell me why. This will mess up bots because it llm generated answers are becoming easier to discern.
Planned obsolescence. Use Lemmy as though one day you aren’t going to anymore and have a replacement lined up. Reddit was the sole source for so long that people got used to it and put up with their enshittification because it was a sole source product. Then Lemmy was made to replace it for people who didn’t want to put up with enshittification, but it will happen here too eventually. So start planning your next move or build it’s replacement now and keep it on standby for when the replacement needs to happen.
It won’t get successful. So, no worries there. And this is a good thing.
Very simply, we jump ship from any server that starts down that dark path. Keep it impossible for any single company to exercise any meaningful control over the fediverse.
Do you mean enshittification as a general term meaning that the overall quality will slip? Because the specific meaning by Cory Doctorow is about centralized commercial platforms. The fediverse isn’t one
I wouldn’t worry about that
What does “enshittification” mean? How is it caused?
Basically, it can happen when one company (or a few companies) dominates a market, so they can gradually make shit worse for everyone, trying to make just a bit more money.
Federation is the solution. As long as there are many servers, run by different owners and administrators, any single server can only fuck itself over.
That is why the open source community likes protocols, interoperability, APIs, and federation. No single software package, or server, should control the entire market. Single-point failure means brittle architecture, whether through accident or intent.
You don’t. It’s cyclical. Regardless of any future enshittification, the world will keep on turning.
Not to be a doomer, but I think enshittification is basically a social form of entropy. It’s inevitable.
One avenue is preventing Lemmy from being commercialized. So far so good, the decentralized structure makes that difficult. But then what keeps it afloat? Does it have to run on the passion of its users? What happens when one of the users does something really bad and there’s calls from powerful people to block Lemmy? Or require an ID to view it. Can a non commercialized Lemmy stand up to that sort of pressure?
Or maybe something less official. Coordinated bad actors show up and errode the site from within, overwhelming the mods who aren’t used to cleaning up so much garbage. Can it muster a unified response as a decentralized platform? If one instance gets ruined can you just create a new instance and move on to the next? Or does that kill the traffic a little each time you split off until nobody’s there anymore?
Or maybe it happens on its own. Mods become too lax in some places, too strict in others. The site decays into a weird space for toxic, chronically online users and nobody really wants to hang out there any more. It becomes a place you go if you want your intelligence insulted for asking a Linux question.
I think eventually something will get it. I’m hoping some of the measures against things like commercialization, trolls, poor moderation or a general degradation of the user experience will be enough to give it a good long life at least.
self-hosting, smaller more thematically-focused instances, and aggressively defederating any instance that hosts ads or propaganda
Prevent corporations from ever gaining foothold here. Even slightest presence should be considered to be similar as to some invasive and rapidly spreading meatmoss and equally disgusting too.
too late.
that is external thing, cant expect to have any control over it in the first place. I think its more like leech than infection point at this point anyway. But if we ever start to just accept it and go “it is what it is” with this too, then that is the first step to things going bad.
once any social media gets popular it gets awful, because people are awful.
By refusing to tolerate intolerance.
As Free Software movement clearly demonstrates, there is only one reliable and reproducible method of preventing enshittification: ability to fork; ability to do things on your own, however you want, without anyone’s approval. However, Fediverse doesn’t grant its users this ability. One can not simply fork an instance and/or a community with all of its data. Even if your instance admins are pretty cool (admins of my instance are pretty cool, just saying!), you still have to rely on their goodwill all the time. And setting up a personal instance doesn’t seem feasible enough to widespread selfhosting…
Enshittification happens when the quality of the service becomes second class to some other goal like making money, building digital surveillance or a psyops platform. As long as Lemmy stays open source, that will not happen, since every move towards anything like that would be immediately obvious.
The problem has already been fixed. What needs to be done is keeping it fixed.
