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?
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?
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 fax 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
That's because email and fax machines aren't businesses either. However commercially run email providers def go through this process.