And how many accounts are just dormant for a decade or at least until some bot farm hacked it and repurposed it to do some Hasbara on your local community sub?
Nola
joined 5 days ago
Honestly? Cause much of the entirety of the US tech capitalist model is just digital feudalism.
Create a compelling reason to join your digital kingdom then when enough people move there you put up the enclosures and start profiting off exploiting your subjects and charging tolls to people wanting to access them.
And ideally enough of that peasantry remain dependent on your digital commons that realistically they can't leave.
The upside is that this process naturally lends itself toward enshitification over time. The downside is that unlike messageboards of old, social media deploys incredibly addictive algorithms to keep a core type of user engaged. And then those habits harden and leaving feels impossible.
TBH I also think that feature can become it's own problem too.
The Fediverse may be good at combating certain forms of enshittification(it's too small right now to know for sure), but what qualifies as such can easily drift into ideological balkanization, purity testing, and arbitrary in-group/out-group policing....Which I already see happening here during my short stay.
And social networks thrive and grow on cross-community connectivity, discovery, and engagement, excessive ideological sorting and fragmentation then undermines that. That is a core contradiction in the Fediverse that I am not sure is easily reconciled.
Where the incentivizes toward that balkanizing also increases the risk of creating a network even more unfriendly or overwhelming to newcomers to navigate(ideological boundaries they didn't create, didn't consent to, and may not even understand), while risks decreasing broader political dialogue, coalition-building, and productive disagreement that makes town square social media what it is and not just a more convoluted Discord for messageboards.