I was thinking either Spez’d or Musked. E.g: Reddit got Spez’d when they killed 3PA.
But the funny thing is that both Spez and Musk were AHoles to the degree that Spez’d and Musked already have their own meaning. Just check urbandictionary
Enshittification is the term that keeps going around ATM.
This is a pretty good article describing the three-phase process of enshittification, and how many platforms have gone through this cycle: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
This made me wonder if the fediverse is immune to that. It seems like it would be due to lack of profit motive and decentralised nature, but eventually if it grows big and corporations come. They will bring the enshittification again won‘t they?
So they‘ll offer the biggest platform with the most useful features to suck all the users in and then slowly ruin it again. Hopefully by then people are used to jumping to a new instance to deal with that appropriately.
IMHO, the fediverse currently is vulnerable to it. Let’s say that Lemmy.ml continues growing ever larger, and in 2 years has 50,000,000 active users. Those kind of user numbers will require full time engineering / admin support as well as dedicated server farms / AWS subscriptions, which will likely cost between $2 and $10 million a year. Also consider that a social network of that scale is going to be getting direct regulatory attention, so add a legal / compliance department on top of that.
Ultimately, someone is going to have to foot the bill for this. In the optimistic scenario, Lemmy.ml would register as a nonprofit, and use a donation-based approach (like Wikipedia). But let’s say that donations continuously under-perform. So Lemmy.ml runs a couple of ads. Before long, the site ends up with a for-profit business model, and starts acting like a company. At this point, the Lemmy.ml community is so large that the site defederates from its much smaller peer without a noticible drop in quality. Give it a couple more years and enshitification ensues.
IMHO, the best thing to do to stop this from happening is for instances to start setting up non-profit funding models NOW. In addition, a non-profit should be set up with the sole purpose of developing the underlying fediverse code that Lemmy runs on.
I mean, the people don‘t need to all be in lemmy.ml, I’m in kbin right now and got another user on sh.it.justworks too and access lemmy.ml and world and so on all from those. Also people like myself with some knowhow and a spare raspberry pi or NAS or maybe even a server could basically host ourselves and maybe a few other users to help out, so the server costs could be shared a bit more.
It‘s a good point though, additional fundraising is important for a sustainable growth especially if Reddit keeps up this path. I think the lemmy devs do have donation pages and get I think the said 1500€ a month for two of them which isn‘t amazing, but at least something.
To clarify, I was using lemmy.ml as my example. Right now, Kbin, Lemmy.ml, and Lemmy.world are all roughly tied for user base size. If that pattern continues, you can probably avoid enshittification by including features such as tha ability to port accounts (which is supposedly coming) and entire communities (which I’m not aware of).
One of the unavoidable vulnerabilities in the Lemmyverse is that you have to host a community on a specific server. That means that even if we have a ton of self-hosted instances, the big communities are going to end up on big instances. And whoever controls those instances can in turn control a lot of the Lemmyverse.
I know it would probably annoy some users, but I would support adding donation buttons directly to the interface of Lemmy / Kbin. Or at least making it explicit that they want donations.
What a thoughtful comment! Both of these abilities are going to be so important to enable users to migrate as soon as things go wrong yeah.
I wouldn‘t mind more prominent donation buttons either, at least as long as it doesn‘t move or flash like an ad would.
How dare you!! Rage!! Anger!!/sThis nugget is always down for a good internet discussion!
That means that even if we have a ton of self-hosted instances, the big communities are going to end up on big instances.
While thus far this has been the case, an interesting detail to note is that this doesn’t necessarily have to remain the case. There is the distinct, yet so far as I’m aware, unrealized possibility of larger communities forming on less populated instances.
Remember: so long as the instances are linked, you can subscribe to/join their communities and post/comment in them, meaning that there is the possibility that communities can potentially outgrow their host instance’s population.
As to what might cause this? Any mix of factors ranging from details like distinct community focus, age, volume of content, quality of content, better moderation, charismatic members, etc.
A larger population has better odds of satisfying these various details to make their communities appeal to more people, but this doesn’t mean a smaller population can’t…It’s just admittedly more difficult.
That’s where the term was coined
That’s the one that popped up in my head.
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Sounds a bit too close to “spaz” for my comfort.
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As a Reddit “user” your are the product (or are producing the product) and not the customer. The customers are companies that want to book advertisement space and AI companies wanting to scrape the data for AI training. So looking from that perspective it’s not so clear if Reddit is “messing up their product”, but of course if enough of the users flee then their product becomes relatively worthless to advertisers. However the body of existing text only slowly loses its value for AI companies, so maybe the current Reddit owners want to cash out on that and don’t really care about the longer term future.
