Enshittification

1577 readers

1 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

hydra

Fediverse enshittification (lemmy.zip)

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

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

As I mentioned in another thread about the same topic, it's theoretically possible but I find it unlikely. It's hard for any single instance to consolidate too much power here; and even when we point out the fact that mastodon.social and lemmy.world are too large within their respective categories, we're mostly pointing out to a potential future problem, not a current issue. In other words they'd need to be orders of magnitude larger to be able to enshittify their Fediverse turfs.