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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Fediverse enshittification (self.enshittification)

submitted 2 months ago by 5dh to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I mean, look at Tumblr and Threads supporting ActivityPub. (Or at least pledging to.) The big corpos are trying their best to enshittify the fediverse. It's so vital that Lemmy instance operators commit to refusing to federate with things like that.

I do think the Fediverse also could stand to have more options for migrating both user accounts and things like communities between instances. I suppose communities can be migrated just by locking the community and leaving a pinned comment saying "we're moving to such-and-such instance ". User accounts can also be done in similar ways. I myself migrated when latte.isnot.coffee disappeared. I didn't really leave any message anywhere saying I was switching instances or anything. (By the time I migrated, latte.isnot.coffee was completely inaccessible. I couldn't change my old account's bio to say I'd moved if I wanted to.)

But maybe some measures to streamline some of that would be nice. In ways that don't lose the history of the user/community.

Edit: Another idea that occurrs to me. I'd imagine it'd be doable to create ActivityPub "proxies". Programs that implement the ActivityPub protocol and forward requets on to an actual Lemmy instance or whatever. But which have extra logic that blocks posts based on content. Maybe anything that has the word "sponsored" in the title or something. And then you could federate with Threads, but block certain content. Not a perfect solution, but could be a decent way to get more content on the Fediverse and maybe expose normies on Threas and Tumblr to the idea of the Fediverse while blocking BS.

[–] Blaze 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It’s so vital that Lemmy instance operators commit to refusing to federate with things like that.

Not sure if you are aware, but Lemmyworld is still federated with Threads: https://fedipact.veganism.social/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Well, that's shitty. Indeed I was not aware. Thanks for being the bearer of bad news, kind stranger.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

There are proxies for activitypub, they're not used for anything good though, mainly for evading defederation, look up activitypub-proxy and activitypub-troll for some examples. Not saying a proxy for it couldn't have some good use, but by in large many are used for the purpose of trolling, spamming, and being malicious in general.