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All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?
It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.
Theoretically some large company could use the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model to take over "open" standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:
Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.
Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though "Email" is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn't that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.
They should officially add a fourth "E" to that model - Enshittification.
We're kind of already seeing it with Mastodon. The official app strongly pushes people toward mastodon.social which is a radioactive dumpster fire. And this isn't even corporate America, it's just the folks who own the name.
Why is mastodon.social so bad?
The biggest issue is that they don't really moderate, so hate speech and bigotry have a greater presence there. I specifically remember a situation where multiple people were reporting things and it took them days (maybe a week or more? I can't remember, but certainly several days) to take it down. And this happens pretty regularly.
Here is hoping lemmy is easier to moderate and doesnt end up like that.
There are several good mastodon instances, just not mastodon.social. Moderating is hard and you have to actually do it and not be afraid it's censorship. Oh, and not being a fascist helps. I'm beginning to wonder about the mastodon.social admins.
Really looking very "investor focused" 🤢
I'm hopeful that lemmy reaches critical mass because of Reddit's absurd policies.
Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made