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] 6 points 1 month ago

Since there is no clear way to monetize the platform, you can't get enshittification as described by Cory Doctorow.

If you take a more general definition where enshittification means the platform prioritizes X behavior to the detriment of users then there might be some possibilities. For example, maybe the admins of some instance decide to push a political narrative to the point that they become widely defederated, resulting in their users being cut off from the wider Fediverse.