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.
No, it’s not possible. The openness of the platform means even if one instance decides to paywall, everyone else keeps working just fine.
Even if, for instance, Threads was widely allowed to federate with Mastodon servers?
That doesn’t affect access to any of the Mastodon servers.
How would federation with Threads have any effect on the usability of a Mastodon instance?
I don’t think it’s impossible. We should be wary, enshittification might find new ways to ruin even the fediverse. I don’t know how, and I’m not pessimistic. But we should not assume we’re safe from the phenomenon.
I think it’s inevitable that enshitification will happen. In fact, we haven’t risen above the shit stage yet.
You’re talking about going downhill, whereas I don’t think it’s gone uphill yet. There’s so few users, that I run through content in about 30ish minutes.
Whereas for as much shit as you’ll talk about reddit, they have infinately more content. I cannot remember EVER running out of content when I was on reddit.
Last night I wanted to talk to people who enjoy the advance wars series. I started playing super famicom wars. And I wanted to post about it. Until I realized this isn’t reddit. There is no community for that here. It’s too niche, and theres no users to support that community. Even if I created it, it would just be 1 community, with like 1 post by me, and 5 subscribers.
Until this place gains millions of users, you can’t talk about enshitification, because we’re already there.
Unless you come here exclusively to talk about linux. In which case, yeah. Good luck with your platform that is currently 30+ years old, and enjoying an all time high userbase of less than 5% despite windows being a dumpster fire, and macs costing more than a house in an economy where everybody lives paycheck to paycheck and will for the rest of their life. They’d rather deal with apple or microsoft than linux, simply because of what linux is.
If thats what you’re here for, than sure. For everybody else, this place feels like it’s continually LOSING users.