how?
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
Enshittification is not the worry. However we’re extremely vulnerable to spam and dead internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
enshitifcation is the inevitable consequence of “up and to the right”, Lemmy, Mastodon and the activity pub protocol don’t suffer that.
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.
I wouldn’t worry about that
self-hosting, smaller more thematically-focused instances, and aggressively defederating any instance that hosts ads or propaganda
You don’t. It’s cyclical. Regardless of any future enshittification, the world will keep on turning.
Look at what Reddit did and do the opposite.
You can’t sell it to a private equity. You just can’t. You also gotta hold onto your principles to the point where it could end up hurting you and you succeeding throughout. You cannot change the layout, you can modify some rules and fuck around with the modification of many things about your site but you have to same amount of layout/design that made your site so much better.
The mods cannot be the end all be all of all decisions, there has to be something of a figure of leadership or unilateral ruling that we all follow to the point where even leadership can be even toppled with steps and amendments and following the spirit of the rule.
Yeah I know, it’s a lot for a site, but we are a lot of humans who do a lot of shit, so we need a lot of rules and a lot of ethics and a lot of care to our rules. It is that deep.
What exactly are your concerns?
