how?
Planned obsolescence. Use Lemmy as though one day you aren’t going to anymore and have a replacement lined up. Reddit was the sole source for so long that people got used to it and put up with their enshittification because it was a sole source product. Then Lemmy was made to replace it for people who didn’t want to put up with enshittification, but it will happen here too eventually. So start planning your next move or build it’s replacement now and keep it on standby for when the replacement needs to happen.
Since it is federated and open source, just create a new instance.
Yeah, run your instance, don’t let shitheads on it, and block shitty instances.
that’s a great idea
Prevent corporations from ever gaining foothold here. Even slightest presence should be considered to be similar as to some invasive and rapidly spreading meatmoss and equally disgusting too.
too late.
that is external thing, cant expect to have any control over it in the first place. I think its more like leech than infection point at this point anyway. But if we ever start to just accept it and go “it is what it is” with this too, then that is the first step to things going bad.
Do you mean enshittification as a general term meaning that the overall quality will slip? Because the specific meaning by Cory Doctorow is about centralized commercial platforms. The fediverse isn’t one
I suspect OP hasn’t put enough thought into it to see why we’re confused. I can see somone who really sat down and thought about the intrusion of centralization in Lemmy as a future scenario but I don’t see how and I don’t think OP does either.
Edit: ok- lemmy could be centralized if bad actors flood garbage content everywhere. Their own instances too numerous to count drown out small and less known ones and their content floods any instance too small to fight back. That would force users into a whitelisted experience that would centralize.
Enshittification is not the worry. However we’re extremely vulnerable to spam and dead internet.
One answer is IPO. Reddit took a nosedive so hard that it made the Titanic look like a fantasy.
My main take is; no down votes without a comment is my take. If you don’t like my opinion, tell me why. This will mess up bots because it llm generated answers are becoming easier to discern.
Very simply, we jump ship from any server that starts down that dark path. Keep it impossible for any single company to exercise any meaningful control over the fediverse.
self-hosting, smaller more thematically-focused instances, and aggressively defederating any instance that hosts ads or propaganda
I wouldn’t worry about that
Think of it like email. We don’t exactly worry about degradification of email. Instead we have to worry about gmail, or proton mail, etc becoming awful.
In the same way, it’s less that Lemmy might go downhill, more that maybe individual instances could. In which case, there are various degrees of how to avoid an instance. Leave, unsubscribe, block, defederate, etc.
For example, Meta created Threads and tried for a while to integrate with Mastodon. But Mastodon is still pretty much the same afaik. Many instances defederated from it, other people just ignored it, some people I’m sure were happy to communicate with a wider crowd.
Of course, the idea breaks down in a couple ways. Communities and communication on ActivityPub isn’t really the same as email. But mainly, email is kinda bad these days because of big actors, bad actors, and just ubiquity. Not sure how to prevent automated spam from clogging up every communication channel.
You don’t. It’s cyclical. Regardless of any future enshittification, the world will keep on turning.
The whole point of Lemmy is that you don’t have to worry about it. Just make new instances. The only real issue is people holding on to their instances too long even though they’ve shown to be a problem. Which I’m not going to be throwing stones on cuz I mean I’m still .world user.
enshitifcation is the inevitable consequence of “up and to the right”, Lemmy, Mastodon and the activity pub protocol don’t suffer that.
one any social media gets popular it gets awful, because people are awful.
Look at what Reddit did and do the opposite.
