I’m an anarchocommunist, all states are evil.

Your local herpetology guy.

Feel free to AMA about picking a pet/reptiles in general, I have a lot of recommendations for that!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you’ll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you’re competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.

    that’s exactly what federation prevents… you can be a scrappy little website and federate, and then you don’t need a massive infrastructure that would cause enshittification later. If you enshittify, people will just leave to other parts of the fediverse, the model causes enshittification to just be the failure of your website.

    This is different from the world wide web in that the content is not partitioned. I can get the same lemmy experience if I go elsewhere, and not lose out on content. If there’s a major new privacy concern on my instance, i’m going to say fuck them and leave, and I’ll lose nothing.

    Also, “no profit motive”? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won’t immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.

    Except they’ll inevitably fail aside from the people who legitimately don’t care, and quite frankly, if they don’t care, who does? Just go to another instance if that happens, you’ll lose nothing, and it won’t even be a problem.

    Federation makes the part of enshittification where you box in your users not work. The reason facebook could enshittify is because if you left facebook, you’d lose ALL of facebook. They trapped people. You can’t trap people like that on the fediverse. The first step fails inevitably, you’ll just make everyone on your instance hate you and they’ll leave for literally any other instance and it will die.

    The fediverse doesn’t work well with profit motive because of that, the only real way to profit without causing anybody who knows anything about what you’re doing maliciously to leave is… what exactly?

    When leaving has no cost, there’s no way to force people to stay if you do something shitty.

    Even if you keep some users, meh, they won’t keep me, and i’ll lose nothing by switching.


  • I completely reject the notion that the mainstream success of the fediverse will be the death of the fediverse, what are your reasons for believing that?

    Enshittification happens to monetized platforms because they tried to capture as many users as possible and then profit off of them, lemmy instances show no profit motive, and are volunteer run. There isn’t a route to enshittification with federation, because even if YOUR instance enshittifies, there’s still many others that will not, and due to federation, you won’t miss out on any content (as long as your instance doesn’t defed), so it won’t matter.

    I also believe the issues you call out, aside from algorithmically driven content, will be solved eventually, as mod tools improve, there will be less of a need for defederation.

    Even algorithmically driven content is partially solved by “hot” and “best” being improved, it’s just not personalized.

    With the rate of lemmy development being as rapid as it is, these things will eventually be solved, but that takes a lot of time. Lemmy is still barely even beta.