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.
Enshittification results from Capitalism. More specifically, it’s caused by corporations seeking to always increase their profitability by squeezing their customers for as much value as they can.
The very nature of the Fediverse is resistant to this for a few reasons:
The Fediverse is like a rainforest. It’s a lush, vibrant, and chaotic ecosystem with thousands of different food chains and micro-ecosystems within it.
There are large fires and die offs sometimes, but new things grow out of them, and every part of the system is interconnected with other parts.
Proprietary social media platforms like FB, Insta, Xitter, etc. Are like a curated garden, where a small team of gardeners wall off a section of land, pick what kinds of plants are allowed to grow, and kill off anything else that they don’t want in there.
Note that all that is not a perfect safety. Capitalism corrupts everything. Email used to be considered completely distributed and impossible to coopt and yet here were are with all email going through a handful of massive corpos and everyone having to dance to their tunes to the point that running one’s own email server is all but practically impossible
Very true.
I really, really like this analogy. I spend my time in the online jungle!