Fediverse enshittification

Federated platforms don't die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.
If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it's still around, but it's greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don't tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)
If the technology isn't developed with an eye to new users' needs and new use cases, because it's "good enough" for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn't work well on mobile — but it's good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.
- I like how old farts are just old farts because they're old. Young people are still farts too. They're just young farts, and will eventually be old farts. And the old farts of today, will eventually be dead farts.
  We're all just farts. All in a fart vacume.
  Just farting our way through life.
  
  Gotta admit, I originally wrote "old farts" and "young shits", and decided that was too rude.

No, it's not possible. The openness of the platform means even if one instance decides to paywall, everyone else keeps working just fine.
- Even if, for instance, Threads was widely allowed to federate with Mastodon servers?
  
  Ironically Mastodon.social is still federated
  https://fedipact.veganism.social/
  But I guess if Threads fully federates with some Mastodon instances, people would leave those instances
  
  That doesn't affect access to any of the Mastodon servers.
  
  How would federation with Threads have any effect on the usability of a Mastodon instance?
- I don’t think it’s impossible. We should be wary, enshittification might find new ways to ruin even the fediverse. I don’t know how, and I’m not pessimistic. But we should not assume we’re safe from the phenomenon.
- I think it's inevitable that enshitification will happen. In fact, we haven't risen above the shit stage yet.
  You're talking about going downhill, whereas I don't think it's gone uphill yet. There's so few users, that I run through content in about 30ish minutes.
  Whereas for as much shit as you'll talk about reddit, they have infinately more content. I cannot remember EVER running out of content when I was on reddit.
  Last night I wanted to talk to people who enjoy the advance wars series. I started playing super famicom wars. And I wanted to post about it. Until I realized this isn't reddit. There is no community for that here. It's too niche, and theres no users to support that community. Even if I created it, it would just be 1 community, with like 1 post by me, and 5 subscribers.
  Until this place gains millions of users, you can't talk about enshitification, because we're already there.
  Unless you come here exclusively to talk about linux. In which case, yeah. Good luck with your platform that is currently 30+ years old, and enjoying an all time high userbase of less than 5% despite windows being a dumpster fire, and macs costing more than a house in an economy where everybody lives paycheck to paycheck and will for the rest of their life. They'd rather deal with apple or microsoft than linux, simply because of what linux is.
  If thats what you're here for, than sure. For everybody else, this place feels like it's continually LOSING users.
  
  There is no community for that here
  If you open a advance wars or super Famicom wars thread on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works and !retrogaming@lemmy.world I'm pretty sure you'll get a lot of answers.
  Everytime I post on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works I get dozens of answers
  Also
  !gardening@lemmy.world
  !inktober@sh.itjust.works
  !foodporn@lemmy.world
  !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz
  !newcommunities@lemmy.world
  There's more than Linux

That's pretty much why I made my own instance: nobody can take it away from me. I can ban whichever instance I deem hostile or don't want content from. Nobody's taking away my API anymore or shoving ads in my face.
Nobody can pull a Reddit or Twitter on the fediverse, there will always be alternative instances to use putting pressure on the big ones to not drive away people.
- Quick question, was your instance hard for you to setup?
  
  A few woes at the beginning but it's been running smoothly since. If you have experince setting up stuff in Docker and exposing them to the Internet over HTTPS, it pretty much mostly just works.
- Same. I loved reddit before it went to h*ll. Now I run my own PieFed instance just for myself and even if the other devs give up on the project I know it will still be there. Cause it's mine
  
  You can say "hill" on the internet. It's ok.

It won't enshittify in the strict Doctorow sense. But it will become shittier as more people who are currently plaguing Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and making those platforms terrible discover the Fediverse and come splatter their cowpats here. That's almost inevitable: it's happened to just about anything that ever became popular.
Incidentally, that's also a big part of the reason why it's supremely important to boycott Threads and not let it federate: the Fediverse needs to grow, but it doesn't need to grow with an influx of low-quality Facebook users.
- Because the FOSS crowd is always so pleasant!
  
  breaks bottle and waves it around menacingly
- It's not like the current group of users is perfect either. There's a lot of circlejerk opinions going around, and I've seen being get majorly downvoted for posting factual info that went against the "hivemind" opinion.
  
  That's going to happen in any community. All you can do about it is checking your own assumptions and providing what you see as proof yourself.
  Or calling them a bunch of idiots. That won't do any good, in a community sense, but it can be personally satisfying.
- How to prevent those people from joining? I don’t think you can.
  On the other hand, Reddit communities never got that terrible, right? Not all of them at least - it’s more that the platform turned to shit. Lemmy prevents that from happening. The concept of communities moderating themselves seems to work pretty well.
- What an incredibly elitist take. I personally think the fediverse should be welcome to everyone.
  
  Do you choose your friends and the folks you hang out with? Of course you do. Why should it be any different in the communities you patronize?
  I came here because I was tired of suffering the morons on traditional social media platforms. The Fediverse is not perfect - nothing ever is - and it has its fair share of undesirables too, but it's much better, and I'm not looking forward to the morons following me here and making things worse. They belong to Facebook and the likes, and they should stay there.
- This pretty much. For as much as people are concerned that the "lack of UX" or the "discoverability" problems keeps people out, the important thing is it keeps normies out.
  As I've seen before on some posts on the Fediverse discussing proprietary platforms, we all already know this. We saw FB went to shit as soon as it started allowing uneducated users.

I think that word is used wrongly here. Enshittification is a specific process and not just a product getting worse.

Who would enshitiffy it, and how?
Bluesky are an example of hard to implement federation, so easy to enshitiffy, but Mastodon and Sharkey are still around

I've only been on this platform for a little less than a year, but my guess is it will be brought down by petty infighting, not financial incentives. World and a few other instances have already decided to defederate from hexbear, and there's enough tension between World and ml that defederation seems like a real possibility. While the goal may be a decentralized platform, the largest communities are on these two instances, and it they break apart their might not be enough content to keep new users' interest.
Even if Lemmy gets past the infighting between the liberal Reddit refugees of World and the, "old Lemmy,"" communists of ml, users seem to tie their identity very heavily towards their instance. I'm worried that in the long term, that will drive people away from committing to cross-instance communities; even now, I hear people brag about how they've blocked entire instances because they're full of, "centrists," or, "tankies." I think the downside of federation is that it leads to tribalism, and enough of it could kill the momentum Lemmy needs to grow.
I don't mean to sound down on Lemmy; it's the most interesting platform I've seen in years, and I'm curious to see how it develops. But at this point, I've abandoned Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and MySpace; I've learned that social media accounts are not permanent parts of your life. I'm having a lot of fun with Lemmy, but I don't expect to be using it in 5 years.
- So far being a sh.ithead is working out pretty well.
  
  Yeah, if I were ever to switch instances, that would probably be my next move. It's still really small, though. Green Text seems like the only decently sized community.

I'd say that it's possible but extremely unlikely. Acc. to Doctorow enshittification requires three things:
"Consolidation" - i.e. the corporation gets too big and powerful
"Unrestricted twiddling for them" - i.e. using power to prevent being legislated on.
"Total ban on twiddling for us" - i.e. enforcing the legislation to prevent competition.
The Fediverse is designed in a way that it's more resistant to #2, as inter-operability decreases the cost of switch for users - if you see an entity (person, corporation, group, whatever) twiddling too much it's relatively painless to pack your things and leave.
However, I believe that if an instance consolidated so much power in #1 that it's enable to enforce an "it's me or them" on the users, even the Fediverse could be enshittified. And by "so much power" I don't mean something like Lemmy World, I mean a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the rest.

Enshittification isn't always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn't because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.
So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.
- I look at redhat differently now. Thanks.
- 4chan is a good example, as it technically stayed nearly the same for the past 10 years.

Not until they are eclipsed by proprietary ActivityPub apps. Threads and Flipboard already exist.
However, there is no AP but proprietary rival to e.g. Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed (edit: there will be?) or PeerTube.
- Unrelated question, how does Piefed differ from Lemmy? Is it designed to exist alongside Lemmy, or is it a better alternative somehow?
  
  Why not both?
  We have topics here, voting is private, image communities can be tiled, there are some differences in rep counting, etc.
  All differences
  
  Not better necessarily, just different. But yes, it exists alongside Lemmy. Hopefully in the future there could be many more alternatives.

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.
- It's part of the reason you don't see the lemmy.world instance in the lemmy server browser.
  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.

Potentially, but in different ways. You could argue that mass defederation and hostility between communities are the beginning of a fediverse specific enshittification process. And instead of running out of money and then swamping platforms with ads, the big servers could run out of money or get a bored admin and instances could dissapear. Constantly dissapearing instances could also be a fediverse specific enshittification process.

Probably not the same kind of « enshitification », but I think the fediverse creates small communities, and sometimes, it’s difficult / impossible to find non-aggressive communities for some subjects.
It’s not really solving the issues caused by the users themselves, especially when communities are not big enough to justify big moderation teams, and those people have no incentive at all to be « kind » (it’s hit or miss I would say). Instead of 1 big community with good moderation, you can end up with many small communities with little or bad moderation.
I have no solution to propose, it’s probably inherent to the fediverse.
- for some subjects.
  Which subjects do you have in mind? Politics?
  
  Not so serious subjects (I prefer to relax while being on the fediverse :) ). Anything related to Facebook / Apple / Nintendo / Disney is almost always filled with comments full of hate. It is much easier to find good communities for that on Discord for example.
  See, in the past, I used a lot Twitter to keep up with news about my interests. It was easy to filter out bad users by banning them, and following more « positive » people. I left when it became « X » because I had less interactions and much more ads (probably a consequence of letting users pay to gain visibility). I hoped the fediverse would replace it.
  In a sense it worked, because I get a lot of news. But now, I am worried to read the comments or even comment myself because people are most of the time not kind at all. More specific communities have not this issue, but the fediverse is so small that you are forced to be part of more general communities and face the general harsh talk of most people.
  
  Yeah, currently every politics thread on the fediverse which gets any traction is hijacked by the same few trolls. Last year they were doing "DNC corruption" and "Blue MAGA." This year they are all "Genocide Joe." It's insanely transparent. I get people have different opinions, but these few individuals do literally nothing on the fediverse but drop the exact same comments in every single thread which has the word "Democrats" or "Biden" or "Harris" in the title.

The mods and admins are the real risk. Not saying that they are, but they can very likely become the ones who ruin lemmy
- Yeah. The blast radius for stupid is higher with more power. See: physics.

no comrade, lemmy vill not be enshittified, everysing for your own good

its a small chance, They are open source projects so if the fediverse lets say mastdon wanted to become greedy it will be very hard for them to close source and also isnt mastodon made by a person.
- Luckily due to the nature of open source being what it is, even if they did choose to close the source the last revision can just be forked and continued from there by the community akin to what happened with Emby/Jellyfin
  
  oh yeah truee they can fork the previous versions i almost forgot

People are the same everywhere...