An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
I mean I am excited for the potential the fediverse has, but I do wonder how long until it becomes enshitified too. Every great new invention that serves the needs of the people always goes downhill at some point. Remember that television networks used to be an amazing platform for all our needs.
You don’t seem to really understand the word enshitification. It’s not just “things getting shittier” - it refers specifically to the capitalist pressures that are exerted on private platforms and services that need to chase investor capital to scale and survive. The reason enshitification happens is because they are operating under a model that needs to first entice users with a high value product that is subsidized by venture capital, but that when that dries up the pressures come first to appease the investors at the expense of the users and then the owners at the expense of the investors. Fediverse for all its croaks and groans in these early stages is specifically designed to be decentralized and scalable by small clusters of users. It’s user owned and managed. When one cluster shows signs of degrading, you can move to another. I’m bullish on fediverse and decentralized platforms like this on being that solution and it’s not clear yet that they suffer the same inevitable enshitification that legacy platforms do.
No I understand the word. What I’m saying is that as the fediverse grows, and large communities develop, there will be large corps will want a piece of the action. They operate with money, they down build or create, they buy. What would you do, you living you life as you are now, but decide to take up running an instance. Assume that instance grows very large and starts getting worldwide recognition, and some corporate affiliated executive invites you to meet and they give you a very real offer of $84,000,000,000 to give the instance to them. They promise to add the features you’ve wanted to implement but was struggling to, offer a team of people to help with your bot and spam issues. Would you turn that down? Idk about you, but I could definitely use 84 million dollars. I hate corps with a passion, I believe they ruin everything they touch, but I could do the things I want with that kind of money.
And so what do the community’s of thousands upon thousands members do when their admin sells out? Do they move? Can the entire community just up and move to another instance and keep the same engagement? Would they even want to? The corpo’s just implemented the features they’ve been asking for for years, they can’t be that bad right? Besides we like it here. I’m sure it’ll be fine, right? Besides, Amazon already ownes one of the other largeest instance, and we’re def not moving to the one meta runs, what’s one more?
And of course once the large corps have thrown all their money at the newest popular thing, they repeat the process. All of them Switch from growth focus to monetization focus and everything turns to shit.
There are other options, there are smaller instances that people could move to, and that probably will happen, but the effect will be similar. People who were all gathered in once place, enjoying one thing, get splintered into lots of other smaller groups, with a newer differenter thing. And it starts over again.
The nice thing is that if things do become shit on one instance, the rest just disconnect. The lack of total control over the system by one entity ensures that there is no complete capture to enable the enshitification from taking root and destroying what is good about it.
I am hopeful, but I am cautiously sceptical. I remember hearing about cryptocurrency taking off in 2011 and all about how it was decentralized and was immune to corruption etc and then a decade later seeing SBF types in the news.
Crypto does have all those benefits, but without wide enough adoption, there’s genuinely nothing valuable about it. Just like real money. It is immune to a certain kind of corruption (manipulating the money supply) but very weak to another kind (making your own worthless currency to scam people with).
Even if we got society to go full crypto acceptance, governments would do all they can to control it. Manipulating the money supply is how you get every politician’s favorite thing ever; an economy fueled through the debt of future generations.
The fediverse has the same conceptual benefits and the same problem of needing large groups of people to grow, but there is a big difference: having spaces for online communication not controlled by single actors is valuable in and of itself. Whether enough people find it valuable enough to participate is up to them, but the concept, at least, is incredibly appealing especially at this current moment.
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The difference here is that there is no supposed or even desired value from the people participating here. We’re not all trying to get rich off of this, nor are we trying to replace all forms of communication here like many crypto purists wish would happen with Bitcoin replacing the dollar. Nothing rides on this being a success, perpetual growth isn’t necessary, and defederation doesn’t mean that our communities wouldn’t still have worth to us.