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.
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.