Do you think maybe it'll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).
Fediverse platforms:
are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don't like some particular change
most instances currently aren't operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously
There's no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there's not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there's a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it's way more likely to end up being some bundled 'online service' company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn't sprung up implies that it's not a workable model.
In fediverse, the data is already public. You'll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it's inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it's just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn't whether someone can find a way to profit, it's whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
Do you think maybe it'll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
Fediverse platforms:
There's no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there's not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there's a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it's way more likely to end up being some bundled 'online service' company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn't sprung up implies that it's not a workable model.
As long as humans are involved and we are looking at a long enough timeframe, the answer is probably always yes.
In fediverse, the data is already public. You'll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it's inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it's just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn't whether someone can find a way to profit, it's whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.