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The fediverse is an opportunity learned societies can’t ignore
(blogs.lse.ac.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.
But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.
That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.
Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.
I believe lemmy.world is to good for it's own good. As one of the largest instances it is under constant attack. This sucks as a user but has lead to many improvements in the code.
I started out there and started a community there. Since then I've moved to a much smaller instance as my main account and contribute monthly. It would be really nice if I could move the community as well.