Enshittification comes from Capitalism and the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, not necessarily centralization. The Fediverse eliminates the issues that lead to enshittification.
@5dh @fediverse Financial incentive is not the only possible cause. If project leaders stop listening to their users for some other reason, you'll get the same result.
And there is another, more subtle problem: protocol bloat. Fediverse services are getting more and more complicated, and the cost of creating a new platform is constantly increasing. If this problem is not addressed, at some point Fediverse will start looking like a web browser market, where new players can't compete due to an immense implementation complexity.
In my opinion, enshittification occurs when, among other things, the user experience is "ruined" in order to generate profits by offering "improvements" that are nothing more than going back to previous states of the platform, only now paying or paying more.
While it could happen that some parts of the Fediverse could become Shitty, it seems impossible to me that it would happen in the whole fediverse. There's always the option of blocking problematic instances and such. And anyway, users who enter the fediverse do so mostly fleeing from enshittification, so, I think, we are less willing to put up with that kind of bullshit and will leave sooner rather than later, maybe creating something new (and better, if possible).
I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of "more X, no matter what". Usually that's profit, but I don't think it's mandatory.
If Lemmy ever really took off things would get harder. There’s quite a few subs but people barely notice.
Yes. It already started with bots to get people on their shitty websites.
They claim to be useful to the site but all it is is free advertising.
For example:
Food AI Helper:
"I see you used the term 'platform' in your post! Here are links to platform cakes! You're Welcome!"
Is this happening on Lemmy? I haven’t seen it
I should've noted the Food Helper thing doesn't exist. My bad attempt for a joke. Sorry.
A real exampls is the Media Bias Bot.
I agree, it's already happening. The Media Bias Fact Checker bot is another example. Nobody I've interacted with wants it, it is functionally useless and inaccurate, and appears to be a cash grab (though we can't know for sure, because the mods refuse to openly discuss it with users). We live in a capitalist society, so even platforms like Lemmy are subject to its pressures, and require active pushback from users to prevent profits from taking precedence over user satisfaction on larger instances.
To be fair, that seems to be more of a Lemmy.world problem, which itself is one of the worst overall instances.
Have you considered moving to similar communities without the bot?
I know I usually recommend !globalnews@lemmy.zip compared to the LW world news
I just subbed, thanks. This is kind of my fundamental challenge with this platform, though. I don’t want to miss anything on the subjects I’m interested in, so I sub to every instances’ version of the same community. I’m probably doing it wrong, but if I sub to just one small sub-community because I like the mods, or the lack of bots, I feel like I’d be missing a lot of content.
Happy to help!
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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