this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
41 points (84.7% liked)

Enshittification

1629 readers
3 users here now

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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [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.