Just as social media has become ubiquitous in academia, its established formats and dynamics have been brought into doubt. Björn Brembs argues that learned societies concerned with their core missi…
Am I weird to think that the fediverse will eventually succumb to enshitification in its own ways? As in, if it does pick up then any easy to sign up and popular instances will have a certain concentration of power and if they try to cater to the masses, they might just end up becoming their own silos if defederated from other instances en masse.
I’m just kinda posting here to air some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the first to think about this and of course I understand this is a feature not a bug.
LW works great, and it has most of the communities so most new people join there
LW starts running Lemmy + some extra features on top
time passes
LW closes off, but it still has the mass of users and new features, and most people don’t care about what this might mean because it still “works great”. There’s not enough friction to jump instances
Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.
But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.
That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.
Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.
I agree, the fediverse is not immune to certain types of problems that come with wider adoption and concentration of power in the hands of the most popular instances; however, the fact it’s rather trivial for other instances to sprout up is its own sort of booster shot against any kind of bullshittery that royally effs the users.
What’s a good mirror instance that is federated with “everybody” to have an account with so you can access all the defederated communities and content if you want for a more liberal account?
No, you definitely aren’t alone in thinking that and to an extent I agree: it is likely for the platform to get shittier in some ways as it grows or matures.
I am hoping that a combination of the design philosophy of Lemmy/Fediverse, incremental improvements to Lemmy and both users and moderators continuing to engage as genuinely as they can, will slow the negatives while growing the positives, and further avoid the pitfalls that centralized social media fall into.
Am I weird to think that the fediverse will eventually succumb to enshitification in its own ways? As in, if it does pick up then any easy to sign up and popular instances will have a certain concentration of power and if they try to cater to the masses, they might just end up becoming their own silos if defederated from other instances en masse.
I’m just kinda posting here to air some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the first to think about this and of course I understand this is a feature not a bug.
deleted by creator
I think the concern is more
deleted by creator
But most users won’t care to do so.
Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.
But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.
That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.
Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.
I agree, the fediverse is not immune to certain types of problems that come with wider adoption and concentration of power in the hands of the most popular instances; however, the fact it’s rather trivial for other instances to sprout up is its own sort of booster shot against any kind of bullshittery that royally effs the users.
What’s a good mirror instance that is federated with “everybody” to have an account with so you can access all the defederated communities and content if you want for a more liberal account?
No, you definitely aren’t alone in thinking that and to an extent I agree: it is likely for the platform to get shittier in some ways as it grows or matures.
I am hoping that a combination of the design philosophy of Lemmy/Fediverse, incremental improvements to Lemmy and both users and moderators continuing to engage as genuinely as they can, will slow the negatives while growing the positives, and further avoid the pitfalls that centralized social media fall into.