1d ago

enshittification

31 comments

I mean isn’t the thing about the Fediverse that if your host instance gets entrenched in enshittification or financial ruin then you can just leapfrog from instance to instance and have all of your old posts still online and the content and userbase of one community can be migrated to another community on another server?
- I’m hosting my own single user instance so I don’t have to worry about that. My instance will live as long as I’m paying the domain fee.
  
  But what good is your own instance if there’s no content?
  
  Dude saw this content. As did you. That is the power of federation.
  
  You can subscribe to anything you want, on any instance.
- Totally unproven dream of the fediverse*
  Imo it'll go like this. 50%+ of the users captured on a single instance. Basically lemmy.world already. It continues to scale until there's millions of active users. Costs get too high and the offer of investment money is too good. The instance sells out. Non-federated killer features creep in ala embrace / extend / extinguish. Nobody else in the community can afford to run it at that scale, too much admin and servers. Data export is turned off. Users don't know how to get their accounts working on a clone or that it exists. Most of them stay on the big instance due to network effect. We end up with a new BlueSky, Threads, or Reddit. The investors win again. A new revolution begins over again ...
  Imo we just enjoy it while it's here & stay small
  
  Imo it'll go like this. 50%+ of the users captured on a single instance. Basically lemmy.world already.
  l.w. barely has even 30% and most of the people doing outreach are suggesting other instances already.
  
  It seems like it should be dead easy to just migrate people and communities to another instance in that case. I don't think it's a risk.
  
  Please explain how then? (Hint: it’s not)
  
  You make new communities on other instances and people sub to them?
  
  All of that could happen and it still wouldn't mean shit in a federated system. One instances gets big and turns to shit, so what?
  
  That problem would have been solved with a dumb back-end and smart front-end both decentralized separately. Have the people in the back-end just providing storage space to store the data and back it up, let anyone develop a front-end to access the data. No more admins, just mods.
  
  You start to run into issues around stuff like CP. who gets the power to delete it? Who’s liable for storing it (legally) if it cascades to all the storage instances? No one? Everyone? What happens when someone abuses that delete power to start to steer discussions in their politically preferred direction? Who has the authority to monitor and regulate removal of those abusers? What if they themselves are abusers? Who watches the watchmen?
  It’s a simple technical solution, but as with all things in life, the shitbag humans are the problem.
  
  Same as right now, hosts use tools to clean up their servers if they don't want to host it. You don't back up everything on all the servers, you can just make sure all data is backed up twice so if one server shuts down there's two backups, so you wouldn't end up with all servers hosting malicious data.
  The delete power abuse is much more of an issue at the moment since admins have complete control over their instance, with what I'm suggesting they can delete messages they don't like from their servers, it's backed up on other servers.
  It gives more control and responsibilities to users by eliminating the admins from the equation altogether. No more instances, no more admins to decide that you can't see the content from instances they don't like, manage your own feed as you have access to the whole database.
- community (following and followers), yes. posts, not always. Mastodon migration doesn't support migrating your posts at the moment, for example.

31 comments