I’m gonna start my own instance, with hookers and blackjack
Comment on The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore
Lifecoach5000@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
It’s a real risk. This is basically what happened with XMPP. Google became big enough to screw over the rest of the XMPP world.
Google took “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” right out of Microsoft’s play book, and at this point it’s just standard operating procedure for any major tech company.
Many people here and on Mastodon were afraid Meta was doing the same thing with Threads a few months back when there was talk of federation (I think they eventually backpedaled on that).
I think we’re okay as long as the big players are open source, and no one instance has an overwhelmingly large share of the user base. I would recommend new Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin users to join an instance that is NOT the most popular (or even in the top 3), in order to maintain some balance in the ecosystem. lemmy.world and kbin.social are many times larger than the #2 biggest instances, and that’s not ideal.
yiliu@informis.land 1 year ago
There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.
But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.
anlumo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Google did not extend XMPP. They let it sit there for a decade, not changing anything. They still only supported SSL 2.0 when servers started to require TLS 1.2 for S2S connections. They didn’t implement any extensions, some vital to the ecosystem back then.
ech@lemm.ee 1 year ago
To be clear, that’s not “enshittification”. Just an undesirable development. Also not a “worst case scenario”, imo. The segmentation of Lemmy/the Fediverse is its biggest strength, tbh, where a problematic instance can be easily blocked or cut off by any individual admin.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?
JimmyBigSausage@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Sure. But then I say “bye bye.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Lemmy is basically guaranteed to fail the exact same way reddit did. More and more users flock to a few centralized instances (some of which are already starting to show very biased and manipulative administration…) which increases hosting costs and so forth. This leads to a need/desire to monetize and, no matter what people pretend, donations are not a viable path.
Which leads to shittier monetization approaches. Which get exacerbated by people being willing to pay a monthly subscription to the app creators to load the content, but not the sites that actually host it.
Peertube, at best, will be the phpbb to the vbulletins of the world, for subscription based websites for influencers. Sort of like how mastodon is the core of a few of the right wing shitholes. Not sure what the “educational” gun nuts are doing on their site, but I am sure it is only a matter of time until Ludwig or Toast try a premium site for their side hustles. And, more likely, peertube will go down in a mess of CSAM and gorn.
Mastodon I actually see surviving. In a good-ish world, we’ll see it being part of a decentralized social media that is resistant to corporate interests. News media and Brands will have their own instances that federate in to protect them from a deranged child of apartheid spamming swastikas everywhere. Is it facebook’s twitter that is also compatible with mastodon? And I can see a world where a couple dozen major “instances” carry on. And this also actually provides a venue (and honeypot…) for social activism and sexwork.
But… most likely mastodon will become like usenet. It exists, a few people love it, but mostly it is just something your ISP might forget they are offering.
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
More and more users flock to a few centralized instances (some of which are already starting to show very biased and manipulative administration…)
If the admins on a particular instance become too biased and manipulative, would users continue to flock to them? Or would they leave for another instance?
A bunch of us already left Reddit for Lemmy. The difference here is that users wouldn’t even need to switch platforms, just instances.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I addressed why the people who left reddit are more a taste of what is to come than anything else.
But that is the point of “certain instances” trying to get a significant percentage of market share. Because any instance will defederate from ten pedophiles. They will think a whole lot more about whether they defederate from 90% of the userbase.
Also: Take a look at The Site Formerly Known as Twitter and how likely people are to leave just because their site is being run by openly manipulative nazis.
sour@kbin.social 1 year ago
no mainstream
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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 continue 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.
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I think the concern is more
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
tb_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But most users won’t care to do so.