cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/24088740
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.
The fediverse’s decentralization is meant to circumvent this possibility. It’s all too easy to ignore one or two bad instances if it comes to that. No matter how big they get. It’s part of the reason you don’t see the lemmy.world instance in the lemmy server browser. It forces people to spread across the instances more instead of lemmy.world taking the direction of the fediverse wherever they see fit due to how many users they have. As long as the admins continue to respect this viewpoint, enshittifcation of the Fediverse will be postponed.
On join-lemmy.org you mean? I didn’t know that, but that’s great to see. Lemmy.world has become pretty big.
That’s correct. The amount of users defaulting to that instance was worrying the admins. They wanted more people to move to other servers to help de-centralize the platform and ensure lemmy.world doesn’t control the whole fediverse through sheer numbers.