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.
Two reasons:
- Lemmy admins aren't accountable to investors or shareholders so there's no pressure to make things worse.
- If enhsittification happens on any instance. Like it's owned by a cooperation. Then other instances can block it/defederate, or users can move to another instance
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.
Is Gimp as fragmented as Lemmy? If I want to use the blue tool do I have to use Gimp A, and crop Gimp B? With Lemmy entire genres could just disappear if my iteration defederates with the interaction that hosted all the interesting topics. If that happens then the community all gets split up among other communities which likely will never come back whole again. It’s the Linux model, which is fine for longevity and availability, but it’s not good for keeping like minded people together. Fragmentation might be fine for a tool, but it’s not great for community.
How would someone buy Lemmy? Even if they bought one instance it could just be forked
Because instances getting larger are going to incur exponentially larger costs. If the largest communities start suffering from performance issues or something like that, it fragments the community into who knows how many instances the community will be split into. The only problem Lemmy has is lack of users and engagement, and I think it’s actually flawed by design in this way. It’s like having a big party, but instead of everyone in one house you split it into a bunch of them with not that many people or food options. Idk if that’s ideal or not.
For us over at Hexbear that's a feature, not a bug. Our instance exists explicitly because we don't want to be subjected to the political moderation of others.
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.
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.
All these r*dditors flooding lemmy still haven't figured out federation lmao.
