Fediverse enshittification

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.

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if an admin becomes tempted with letting sponsored content to filter into the network, they will face defederation and an diaspora of their users.
that's why it's also important to support your server admin financially so they don't have an incentive of looking for third party financing in the first place.
- I very much agree. But what if a very important Lemmy community is on a server that decides to allow sponsored content or something similar, it'll be hard for the community to move. Maybe Lemmy should implement tools for moving communities when it's necessary.
  
  Allowing for mods to be able to move communities is definitely something that is needed, though the same could also be said about moving accounts and their post history. Neither of which has much work done and isn't considered "important enough" by any of the platforms, even Mastodon which is relatively far along compared to Lemmy doesn't consider moving accounts and their post histories to be worth while.

I hope not. Us mods work very hard to keep spammers and bots off the platform. Please be sure to flag them when you see them because we might miss them.

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 and most of its infrastructure is open source and copy-left licensed. This creates an immune response that always allows both devs and users to easily leave bad platforms/services for better ones. There is no vendor/provider lock-in.
The Fediverse is distributed. Unlike centralized platforms that concentrate power and influence into smaller and smaller groups/decision makers, the Fediverse is spread wide accross thousands of servers in many different parts of the world with no centralized organization or group that controls them.
The Fediverse is not designed for monetization. The motivation for the Fediverse is in large part, to create an open and inclusive space for communities of many kinds to connect. Most instances and projects are supported in large part or completely by donations.
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
  
  The same thing that accelerated email’s consolidation may affect the fediverse as well - spam.
  
  Very true.
- 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.
  I really, really like this analogy. I spend my time in the online jungle!

As I mentioned in another thread about the same topic, it's theoretically possible but I find it unlikely. It's hard for any single instance to consolidate too much power here; and even when we point out the fact that mastodon.social and lemmy.world are too large within their respective categories, we're mostly pointing out to a potential future problem, not a current issue. In other words they'd need to be orders of magnitude larger to be able to enshittify their Fediverse turfs.

It depends on how things go with Threads and BlueSky. If either one were to gain a significant market share of the fediverse they could capture the ActivityPub protocol and add poisonous elements to it and require anyone federating to comply.
Under normal circumstances, a fediverser could switch instances, but that entirely depends on the platform continuing to allow users to export their accounts. Unless servers stop costing money, it's only a matter of time before the fediverse is polluted and fractured.

There's some potential to it, but as threads is one of the most defederated instance, there's hope that it'll at worst go something like this:
Instance gets big and popular.
People running the instance get greedy and put ads on their platform.
People slowly start to leave the instance.
Other instances start to defederate them.
3 and 4 becomes so bad, the instance at best becomes an undead one, at worst it completely disappears.

Copying my reply from the cross post:
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.

Since there is no clear way to monetize the platform, you can't get enshittification as described by Cory Doctorow.
If you take a more general definition where enshittification means the platform prioritizes X behavior to the detriment of users then there might be some possibilities. For example, maybe the admins of some instance decide to push a political narrative to the point that they become widely defederated, resulting in their users being cut off from the wider Fediverse.

I don't think the concept of enshittification really applies to a network like the fediverse.
Enshittification happens, when companies can deliberately make their product worse for profit.
But with the fediverse, there is no single party that can just add more ads and tracking to their service (except maybe threads by meta, but this is a different story).
If the fediverse fails, then probably because it fails to attract high quality content and only gets spam and bots instead.
- It can. Email is just a protocol and yet due to the our complacency it has been all but completely captured by Google and Microsoft
  
  It would look much worse if microsoft had full control over email.

I mean, look at Tumblr and Threads supporting ActivityPub. (Or at least pledging to.) The big corpos are trying their best to enshittify the fediverse. It's so vital that Lemmy instance operators commit to refusing to federate with things like that.
I do think the Fediverse also could stand to have more options for migrating both user accounts and things like communities between instances. I suppose communities can be migrated just by locking the community and leaving a pinned comment saying "we're moving to such-and-such instance
<link>
". User accounts can also be done in similar ways. I myself migrated when latte.isnot.coffee disappeared. I didn't really leave any message anywhere saying I was switching instances or anything. (By the time I migrated, latte.isnot.coffee was completely inaccessible. I couldn't change my old account's bio to say I'd moved if I wanted to.)
But maybe some measures to streamline some of that would be nice. In ways that don't lose the history of the user/community.
Edit: Another idea that occurrs to me. I'd imagine it'd be doable to create ActivityPub "proxies". Programs that implement the ActivityPub protocol and forward requets on to an actual Lemmy instance or whatever. But which have extra logic that blocks posts based on content. Maybe anything that has the word "sponsored" in the title or something. And then you could federate with Threads, but block certain content. Not a perfect solution, but could be a decent way to get more content on the Fediverse and maybe expose normies on Threas and Tumblr to the idea of the Fediverse while blocking BS.
- It’s so vital that Lemmy instance operators commit to refusing to federate with things like that.
  Not sure if you are aware, but Lemmyworld is still federated with Threads: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
  
  Well, that's shitty. Indeed I was not aware. Thanks for being the bearer of bad news, kind stranger.
- There are proxies for activitypub, they're not used for anything good though, mainly for evading defederation, look up activitypub-proxy and activitypub-troll for some examples. Not saying a proxy for it couldn't have some good use, but by in large many are used for the purpose of trolling, spamming, and being malicious in general.

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