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] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Note that all that is not a perfect safety. Capitalism corrupts everything. Email used to be considered completely distributed and impossible to coopt and yet here were are with all email going through a handful of massive corpos and everyone having to dance to their tunes to the point that running one's own email server is all but practically impossible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The same thing that accelerated email’s consolidation may affect the fediverse as well - spam.

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

Yep, that's what it always is. Strange as it is to say, maybe we need to be a bit more tolerant of spam, after all it's never going to go away, it still happens on corporate enshittified platforms (so consolidation doesn't really help). Maybe we just need to get used to it and not give up what's important over being mildly or moderately annoyed. Just delete it and move on with your day. You'll still deal with it on corporate platforms just the same, so why sacrifice freedom for the cost of being slightly less annoyed. Ads in the inbox are so much more annoying than spam which can be deleted and blocked, that's the trade off.

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

Very true.