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] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Enshittification results from Capitalism. More specifically, it's caused by corporations seeking to always increase their profitability by squeezing their customers for as much value as they can.

The very nature of the Fediverse is resistant to this for a few reasons:

The Fediverse and most of its infrastructure is open source and copy-left licensed. This creates an immune response that always allows both devs and users to easily leave bad platforms/services for better ones. There is no vendor/provider lock-in.
The Fediverse is distributed. Unlike centralized platforms that concentrate power and influence into smaller and smaller groups/decision makers, the Fediverse is spread wide accross thousands of servers in many different parts of the world with no centralized organization or group that controls them.
The Fediverse is not designed for monetization. The motivation for the Fediverse is in large part, to create an open and inclusive space for communities of many kinds to connect. Most instances and projects are supported in large part or completely by donations.

The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It's a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it.

There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts.

Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don't want in there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Note that all that is not a perfect safety. Capitalism corrupts everything. Email used to be considered completely distributed and impossible to coopt and yet here were are with all email going through a handful of massive corpos and everyone having to dance to their tunes to the point that running one's own email server is all but practically impossible

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

The same thing that accelerated email’s consolidation may affect the fediverse as well - spam.

[–] Draconic_NEO 1 points 1 month ago

Yep, that's what it always is. Strange as it is to say, maybe we need to be a bit more tolerant of spam, after all it's never going to go away, it still happens on corporate enshittified platforms (so consolidation doesn't really help). Maybe we just need to get used to it and not give up what's important over being mildly or moderately annoyed. Just delete it and move on with your day. You'll still deal with it on corporate platforms just the same, so why sacrifice freedom for the cost of being slightly less annoyed. Ads in the inbox are so much more annoying than spam which can be deleted and blocked, that's the trade off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Very true.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It's a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it. There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts. Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don't want in there.

I really, really like this analogy. I spend my time in the online jungle!