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.
once any social media gets popular it gets awful, because people are awful.
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.
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.
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
You don’t. It’s cyclical. Regardless of any future enshittification, the world will keep on turning.
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.
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.
Enshittification is not the worry. However we’re extremely vulnerable to spam and dead internet.
Since it is federated and open source, just create a new instance.
With hookers and blackjack
In fact, forget the new instance
If there’s no blow im out
As long as it’s not shitty 6:5 blackjack. Bring me that good 3:2 shit.
But you can only split once and no doubling after split.
I can get behind both of these 🤠
Yeah, run your instance, don’t let shitheads on it, and block shitty instances.
that’s a great idea
Enshittification is a result of commercialisation.
The Forumverse cannot be commercialised. If an instance starts showing advertisements, its users will migrate to ones that don’t.
I don’t think this network can enshittify.
A complex example of this is Threads™️
It’s the largest Mastodon interfacing instance (much larger than mastodon.social) otoh Threads is blocked by most instances and actual federated interaction aren’t remotely common.
By refusing to tolerate intolerance.
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.
