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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can't enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that's under central control. But you also can't do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn't. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
That's an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I'm from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren't tech savy... this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We've already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.
I'm reasonably tech savvy and even I'd struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.
There's a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can't. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that's hosted on .sh.itjust.works.
There's also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.
Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don't see how the venture capital firm could stop them... For as long as one organization doesn't control 60%+ of all user's instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen... but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.
They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn't under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don't control 60%+ of all user's instances we are good.
It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that's what I hope.
Why? Why wouldn't they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?
You don't need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That's what the users are coming for.
As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren't posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn't an audience there. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn't immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.
Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don't know..., .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world's content.
I wouldn't say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn't kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.