this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Your points about the Fediverse being immune to enshittification feel like echoes of what we'd say about the world wide web twenty five or so years ago. The web itself is somewhat of a federated platform. Websites are analogous to instances. And while it would be dubious to claim that the entire web as an infrastructure has enshittified (though Google sure seems to be trying...), I think it's not controversial at all to claim that the biggest players alive on the web have.
Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you'll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you're competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.
I see two roads for the Fediverse. Either it never grows past some filter and remains scrappy, or several large instances for the biggest platforms will dominate, sap up the market share of attention, and then use their weight to pressure how the protocol is maintained in the future, embrace-extend-extinguish style.
Also, "no profit motive"? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won't immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.
that's exactly what federation prevents... you can be a scrappy little website and federate, and then you don't need a massive infrastructure that would cause enshittification later. If you enshittify, people will just leave to other parts of the fediverse, the model causes enshittification to just be the failure of your website.
This is different from the world wide web in that the content is not partitioned. I can get the same lemmy experience if I go elsewhere, and not lose out on content. If there's a major new privacy concern on my instance, i'm going to say fuck them and leave, and I'll lose nothing.
Except they'll inevitably fail aside from the people who legitimately don't care, and quite frankly, if they don't care, who does? Just go to another instance if that happens, you'll lose nothing, and it won't even be a problem.
Federation makes the part of enshittification where you box in your users not work. The reason facebook could enshittify is because if you left facebook, you'd lose ALL of facebook. They trapped people. You can't trap people like that on the fediverse. The first step fails inevitably, you'll just make everyone on your instance hate you and they'll leave for literally any other instance and it will die.
The fediverse doesn't work well with profit motive because of that, the only real way to profit without causing anybody who knows anything about what you're doing maliciously to leave is... what exactly?
When leaving has no cost, there's no way to force people to stay if you do something shitty.
Even if you keep some users, meh, they won't keep me, and i'll lose nothing by switching.