Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

self-hosting, smaller more thematically-focused instances, and aggressively defederating any instance that hosts ads or propaganda

one any social media gets popular it gets awful, because people are awful.

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.

Enshittification is not the worry. However we're extremely vulnerable to spam and dead internet.

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.

Since it is federated and open source, just create a new instance.

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.

By refusing to tolerate intolerance.

The decentralized nature of it already prevents it being enshittified. If one instance turns to shit, others will be made to take its place.

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.

Don't become a publically tradable company for starters.

If you want to know how this works look at IRC when that idiot bought freenode it will be just fine.

Think of it like email. We don't exactly worry about degradification of email. Instead we have to worry about gmail, or proton mail, etc becoming awful.

In the same way, it's less that Lemmy might go downhill, more that maybe individual instances could. In which case, there are various degrees of how to avoid an instance. Leave, unsubscribe, block, defederate, etc.

For example, Meta created Threads and tried for a while to integrate with Mastodon. But Mastodon is still pretty much the same afaik. Many instances defederated from it, other people just ignored it, some people I'm sure were happy to communicate with a wider crowd.

Of course, the idea breaks down in a couple ways. Communities and communication on ActivityPub isn't really the same as email. But mainly, email is kinda bad these days because of big actors, bad actors, and just ubiquity. Not sure how to prevent automated spam from clogging up every communication channel.

The whole point of Lemmy is that you don't have to worry about it. Just make new instances. The only real issue is people holding on to their instances too long even though they've shown to be a problem. Which I'm not going to be throwing stones on cuz I mean I'm still .world user.

enshitifcation is the inevitable consequence of "up and to the right", Lemmy, Mastodon and the activity pub protocol don't suffer that.

I think there are internal fundemental ideas behind the fediverse that, if protected, will mitigate this issue.

So long as we don't go the way of XMPP who allowed google into their eco-system allowing them to dictate the path forward by being the largest user. Google+ was allowed to federate, it became the largest user pool, and when it changed XMPP either followed or defederated causing users to lose contacts and google+ users to see XMPP users vanishing every so often. All they needed to do was make it harder to keep up than it was worth and XMPP pittered out.

A federated, non-corporate set of platforms won't have the same tendancies as they don't have the same goals, the same influences. If it gets big, and we resist corporations the whole way through, we won't need to fuck shit up for money.

What worries me is that many Mastodon instances instantly wanted to federate with BlueSky. Same with tumblr. So stupid.

As long as we don't have a karma system that users can abuse, we should be fine. Most spammers are quickly banned and it's a good thing.

IMHO the only issue could arise from off-topic posts IF mods don't do their job anymore (i.e. delete offending posts).

Please excuse the messy analogy:

Lemmy is an open source software running on different servers (instances, or websites as you may experience them) and administered by different people.

It is not developed or operated for profit. If the developers decided to pivot to extracting money from it (lol, lmao even) people could just fork and keep the older versions going.

Each instance can be run however the admin desires, which is why you will see people calling certain mods or admin authoritarian or power tripping. Unlike reddit, where there may be expectation that moderation activity is in line with reddit policy, each instance will have their own style.

Edit: introduces an analogy and forgets to use it 😶‍🌫️ It was actually pretty trash so I'm just going to leave it out lol

That’s a big “if” but one can dream…

Look at what Reddit did and do the opposite.

most of it is going to be smart people adding the ability for people to be able to screen out fud. It may not even be possible ultimately but it will be a fun ride until then and a chalenge for those who are game to take it on.