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Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?

Lemmy and Mastodon do give me the hope, that when one platform turns to shit, there will be people creating a platform that - for the time being - is not.

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[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

There's some potential to it, but as threads is one of the most defederated instance, there's hope that it'll at worst go something like this:

  1. Instance gets big and popular.
  2. People running the instance get greedy and put ads on their platform.
  3. People slowly start to leave the instance.
  4. Other instances start to defederate them.
  5. 3 and 4 becomes so bad, the instance at best becomes an undead one, at worst it completely disappears.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
41 points (84.7% liked)

Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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