cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/24088740
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.
It won’t enshittify in the strict Doctorow sense. But it will become shittier as more people who are currently plaguing Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and making those platforms terrible discover the Fediverse and come splatter their cowpats here. That’s almost inevitable: it’s happened to just about anything that ever became popular.
Incidentally, that’s also a big part of the reason why it’s supremely important to boycott Threads and not let it federate: the Fediverse needs to grow, but it doesn’t need to grow with an influx of low-quality Facebook users.
It’s not like the current group of users is perfect either. There’s a lot of circlejerk opinions going around, and I’ve seen being get majorly downvoted for posting factual info that went against the “hivemind” opinion.
That’s going to happen in any community. All you can do about it is checking your own assumptions and providing what you see as proof yourself.
Or calling them a bunch of idiots. That won’t do any good, in a community sense, but it can be personally satisfying.
Because the FOSS crowd is always so pleasant!
breaks bottle and waves it around menacingly
How to prevent those people from joining? I don’t think you can.
On the other hand, Reddit communities never got that terrible, right? Not all of them at least - it’s more that the platform turned to shit. Lemmy prevents that from happening. The concept of communities moderating themselves seems to work pretty well.