Submitted 1 year ago by catgirl2005@lemm.ee to meta@lemm.ee
If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won’t go the same way eventually?
Two reasons:
Both of these reasons only remain true if Lemmy stays small.
Imagine GIMP is enshitified somehow. Well that won’t work because the source code is available and people will just create a fork and work with that instead.
There’s many Lemmy and Mastodons servers AND clients out there, being open source is already one thing add federation on top and you see no one really is in control of Lemmy or Mastodon as a whole.
How so? If the platform gains more adoption what could happen? Say lemmy.world grows too large and goes completely off the rails, many of us are already happy on other instances.
And if we don’t like the route the lemmy devs take? Someone will fork it. Look at kbin, sole dev is going through some stuff and now mbin is a thing and fedia already switched over.
We:re in a much better position here.
How would someone buy Lemmy? Even if they bought one instance it could just be forked
Lemmy can always stay small. If an instance is getting too bogged down, they can close sign ups and people will find other instances. Federation helps spread the load.
Check out the business lifecycle. “Enshittification” occurs after a business reaches maturity and has to squeeze more money out of its users or decline. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all businesses, so they follow this cycle - Lemmy and Mastodon are not so they do not. That’s not to say that bad moderation can’t crater a user base, but it’s not inevitable like it is with businesses.
Yeah not to use the same metaphor everyone seems to use but email didn’t go through “enshittification” and like fax machines didn’t, even though they died out, because it’s a feature of the business cycle, not a feature of technological innovation.
What if I told you it was more than just the business cycle
What if I told you the entire economic structure acted like this marx-joker
That’s because email and fax machines aren’t businesses either.
If you’re using “enshittification” the same way Cory Doctorow does, then the key is reducing the cost of moving to alternatives. Once a platform has a captive market then they can start taking advantage of consumers and advertisers.
Support for ActivityPub is, in my opinion, an important component because it allows for a standardized way to consume content from social media networks.
This makes sense, thanks!
For sure! Cory is much more articulate than me. If you have 45 minutes I recommend watching his Defcon keynote youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=qI_xdRebnDqnSEiL
That’s why adding the ability to move accounts and entire communities between instances should be a top priority imo.
The key is decentralization, if an instance gets wonky, it can be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. Or at least sections of it. I suspect in the future there will be “blobs” of instances with little to no interaction with other blobs.
The absence of the profit motive.
lack of pressure from investors to make a return
This is the whole point of federation, having multiple instances, and being open source. It’s also why a bunch of the people on here are Linux heads.
Keep on mind that lemmy isn’t owned by a single corporation ir organization. It is a bunch of individually owned instances that talk to each other. This means that if you own an instance, you have contr of how it is moderated, but you have to balance that freedom with making your instance a place other instances will have to connect to. Its very democratic.
This goes all the way to the source code, which is open. So, even if the devs try to change it and exert more control, it could be forked.
Of course, you could still be a doomer and say something could come along and ruin it. But, it’s at least better than private, venture funded internet platforms on paper.
The profit motive isn’t there. Enshittification is, for lack of a better term, digital rent-seeking behavior.
An anticapitalist site is ideologically opposed to the profit motive and is not seeking out profits above all else, as long as it is being properly funded by donations: we have nothing to worry about.
4chan is somewhat similar, 4chan is not a business and isn’t looking for a profit. But I get the feeling there is no shortage of megachurches or Koch industries funding the site.
It’s multiple websites. If admins of lemm.ee (for example) make some awful choices users will jump ship to another instance, still using the same app, and still subscribing to most of their communities.
given a long enough timespan enshitrification is 100% likely, but given the same timespan only the people who pay the bills will be using it, everyone else will have long since left for the “new big thing”
I’m sure there are more but here’s a few off the top of my head:
The ability to defederate from any instance that tries. truthsocial.com and gab.com are based on Mastodon, and they’re cut off from the Fediverse because they’re “downhill” to put it lightly. If the instance you’re on starts acting funky you can just pack up and leave. If Facebook starts asking for your driver’s license where are you going to go? There is no other Facebook, and your friends wouldn’t be there if there was.
The ability/culture for users to donate to their instance admins. Your instance admin should transparently list all their costs and donations, so everyone is aware how much is needed to cover infrastructure. Not counting volunteer hours, it’s very cheap to run these servers as long as the average person kicks in a buck every so often. The amount an average person needs to donate is probably like 5-10 cents a month, which can easily be covered by generous patrons. I personally donate about $10/month to my instance, which is way overkill and probably covers a significant chunk of their operating expenses (not that they need my money, I’m sure).
No inherent need for people to use the software. No one is making money from higher site activity time, there’s no need to have black box algorithms that try to keep you engaged by promoting ragebait etc
Decentralized nature makes it impossible to “buy it out”. Technically a company could probably coerce an existing Fedi server to sell so they can start causing chaos, but they can’t just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user. Spread out among the servers and protections will only grow stronger.
but they can’t just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user.
Thanks for the detailed response! Sorry for the dumb question but: Why can’t someone buy Eugen Rochko’s company for $44 billion?
Way outside my wheelhouse so take the following with a grain of salt, but TMK the company that “owns” Mastodon is a non-profit LLC named Mastoton gGmbH and probably isn’t technically worth anything by itself. Not that they would ever sell to you, but by purchasing, you wouldn’t own the codebase or any of the instances. The community would immediately fork the codebase, most of the members of the Mastodon gGmbH would leave and reincorporate as a new entity and continue their work on the codebase, and life would go on without much of a hitch.
The people running the instances (currently) don’t run their sites as a business.
The federated protocol itself makes no difference; lemmy.world is a good 70% of the content and could essentially run this part of the fediverse if it wanted to, as it is close to a monopoly already.
Thankfully, they aren’t greedy owners. They are fine with it “losing money” and not running ads and such.
jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This isn’t a business. All these instances are hosted by volunteers and nobody is accountable to any shareholders.
catgirl2005@lemm.ee 1 year ago
If that’s the case then what does Eugen Rochko do? Or is it like Linux where Linus Torvalds works on Linux every day but doesn’t actually own or control things that are based on Linux (such as Android)?
yote_zip@pawb.social 1 year ago
Mastodon and others are FOSS, yes. People either volunteer their hours or are paid by an interested party/company to working on FOSS projects, but in both cases they release their work for free to everyone. Even if they start corrupting their codebase to appease corporate sponsors, the community can fork the project and keep it going without the original developers’ influence. E.g. it doesn’t matter if Eugen gets a railroad spike through the head and decides that putting ads on Mastodon is a good idea, we will fork the project and continue on without them.