Because it’s federated, everyone can just leave.
Because of the networking effect, people don’t leave. People have stubbornly clung to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube in the face of enshittification.
This notion that everyone’s just going to pick up and leave Lemmy hasn’t even worked on Reddit, the OG thing everyone was supposed to pick up and leave after it went to shit.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Federation is strong specifically because of how it gets around the networking effect. You don’t need a .world account to see content from it. That doesn’t apply for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube without shenanigans.
You don’t need to leave lemmy. It takes 10 minutes to set up a new account somewhere else, with zero downsides.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Federation doesn’t get around the networking effect. It inhibits the network’s growth by allowing the community to fracture along instances, depending on the whims of the admins. But when one community outstrips the rest, its meaningless.
Federating mitigates the flaws of OG Mastadon, as it allows individual users to stack threads from multiple participating instances. But as soon as their native instance goes to shit, they’ve got to pick up a new account somewhere else and rebuild their profiles. And people - by and large - don’t like doing that repeatedly.
“It takes 10 minutes to set up an account in App X” is the same line I’ve heard explaining why people would leave Twitter or Facebook or Reddit.
Why doesn’t BlueSky have all of Twitter’s business if it’s so easy?
msage@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
If you control the main server, breaking federation is not a problem.