Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Do you think maybe it’ll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).
Fediverse platforms:
are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don’t like some particular change
most instances currently aren’t operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously
There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it’s way more likely to end up being some bundled ‘online service’ company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn’t sprung up implies that it’s not a workable model.
I mean the mods and admins won’t all go away at once, right? It’s probably gonna be gradual, so maybe the existing mods can keep any new/replacing mods in check? I dunno…
Plus, do you think maybe a donation model could be viable for platforms like this? It’s split over multiple instances so surely at least the smaller ones could be ran off of donation money?
Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.
As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?
In fediverse, the data is already public. You’ll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
This is going to be the most quoted literary work of the 21st century
Do you think maybe it’ll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
Fediverse platforms:
Hmm yeah that’s what I was thinking… May kbin and lemmy live long and prosper 🖖
There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it’s way more likely to end up being some bundled ‘online service’ company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn’t sprung up implies that it’s not a workable model.
I mean the mods and admins won’t all go away at once, right? It’s probably gonna be gradual, so maybe the existing mods can keep any new/replacing mods in check? I dunno…
Plus, do you think maybe a donation model could be viable for platforms like this? It’s split over multiple instances so surely at least the smaller ones could be ran off of donation money?
Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.
As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?
In fediverse, the data is already public. You’ll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
As long as humans are involved and we are looking at a long enough timeframe, the answer is probably always yes.