If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won’t go the same way eventually?
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This isn’t a business. All these instances are hosted by volunteers and nobody is accountable to any shareholders.
If that’s the case then what does Eugen Rochko do? Or is it like Linux where Linus Torvalds works on Linux every day but doesn’t actually own or control things that are based on Linux (such as Android)?
Mastodon and others are FOSS, yes. People either volunteer their hours or are paid by an interested party/company to work on FOSS projects, but in both cases they release their work for free to everyone. Even if they start corrupting their codebase to appease corporate sponsors, the community can fork the project and keep it going without the original developers’ influence. E.g. it doesn’t matter if Eugen gets a railroad spike through the head and decides that putting ads on Mastodon is a good idea, we will fork the project and continue on without them.
Check out the business lifecycle. “Enshittification” occurs after a business reaches maturity and has to squeeze more money out of its users or decline. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all businesses, so they follow this cycle - Lemmy and Mastodon are not so they do not. That’s not to say that bad moderation can’t crater a user base, but it’s not inevitable like it is with businesses.
Yeah not to use the same metaphor everyone seems to use but email didn’t go through “enshittification” and like fax machines didn’t, even though fax died out, because it’s a feature of the business cycle, not a feature of technological innovation.
What if I told you it was more than just the business cycle
What if I told you the entire economic structure acted like this
Two reasons:
- Lemmy admins aren’t accountable to investors or shareholders so there’s no pressure to make things worse.
- If enhsittification happens on any instance. Like it’s owned by a cooperation. Then other instances can block it/defederate, or users can move to another instance
Both of these reasons only remain true if Lemmy stays small.
Imagine GIMP is enshitified somehow. Well that won’t work because the source code is available and people will just create a fork and work with that instead.
There’s many Lemmy and Mastodons servers AND clients out there, being open source is already one thing add federation on top and you see no one really is in control of Lemmy or Mastodon as a whole.
Is Gimp as fragmented as Lemmy? If I want to use the blue tool do I have to use Gimp A, and crop Gimp B? With Lemmy entire genres could just disappear if my iteration defederates with the interaction that hosted all the interesting topics. If that happens then the community all gets split up among other communities which likely will never come back whole again. It’s the Linux model, which is fine for longevity and availability, but it’s not good for keeping like minded people together. Fragmentation might be fine for a tool, but it’s not great for community.
How would someone buy Lemmy? Even if they bought one instance it could just be forked
Because instances getting larger are going to incur exponentially larger costs. If the largest communities start suffering from performance issues or something like that, it fragments the community into who knows how many instances the community will be split into. The only problem Lemmy has is lack of users and engagement, and I think it’s actually flawed by design in this way. It’s like having a big party, but instead of everyone in one house you split it into a bunch of them with not that many people or food options. Idk if that’s ideal or not.
For us over at Hexbear that’s a feature, not a bug. Our instance exists explicitly because we don’t want to be subjected to the political moderation of others.
How so? If the platform gains more adoption what could happen? Say lemmy.world grows too large and goes completely off the rails, many of us are already happy on other instances.
And if we don’t like the route the lemmy devs take? Someone will fork it. Look at kbin, sole dev is going through some stuff and now [mbin is a thing] (https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin)g and fedia already switched over.
We:re in a much better position here.
Costs rise exponentially as sites get larger. Moderation becomes more important, more team members have to come on board, overhead, etc.
From a platform standpoint, sure, it won’t go away. But the platform is meaningless without communities, and a system built to easily dismantle communities is questionable at best for longevity. This is my third or fourth Lemmy-esk account due to a random assortment of annoying issues. Any number of instances could defederate from mine and I’d be forced to either move again or miss out on content I’m used to. There’s no guarantee user names will be available everywhere, so I find the prospects for community building extremely suspect long term.
Uhm… costs don’t rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don’t have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
More people, more resources. More people, more moderation. More people, more problems. More time consuming. More admins, more time to make decisions. And so on.
Yea but that’s not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. That means the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
I mean in the initial growth phase. Yes it will eventually flatten out, but the way Lemmy is run atm won’t likely do that unless it stays small.
