Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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Fediverse enshittification (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/enshittification

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think the concept of enshittification really applies to a network like the fediverse.

Enshittification happens, when companies can deliberately make their product worse for profit.

But with the fediverse, there is no single party that can just add more ads and tracking to their service (except maybe threads by meta, but this is a different story).

If the fediverse fails, then probably because it fails to attract high quality content and only gets spam and bots instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It can. Email is just a protocol and yet due to the our complacency it has been all but completely captured by Google and Microsoft

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It would look much worse if microsoft had full control over email.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Maybe. But email is not exactly looking great these days