Just as social media has become ubiquitous in academia, its established formats and dynamics have been brought into doubt. Björn Brembs argues that learned societies concerned with their core missi…
Am I weird to think that the fediverse will eventually succumb to enshitification in its own ways? As in, if it does pick up then any easy to sign up and popular instances will have a certain concentration of power and if they try to cater to the masses, they might just end up becoming their own silos if defederated from other instances en masse.
I’m just kinda posting here to air some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the first to think about this and of course I understand this is a feature not a bug.
I agree, the fediverse is not immune to certain types of problems that come with wider adoption and concentration of power in the hands of the most popular instances; however, the fact it’s rather trivial for other instances to sprout up is its own sort of booster shot against any kind of bullshittery that royally effs the users.
Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.
But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.
That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.
Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.
What’s a good mirror instance that is federated with “everybody” to have an account with so you can access all the defederated communities and content if you want for a more liberal account?
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Am I weird to think that the fediverse will eventually succumb to enshitification in its own ways? As in, if it does pick up then any easy to sign up and popular instances will have a certain concentration of power and if they try to cater to the masses, they might just end up becoming their own silos if defederated from other instances en masse.
I’m just kinda posting here to air some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the first to think about this and of course I understand this is a feature not a bug.
I agree, the fediverse is not immune to certain types of problems that come with wider adoption and concentration of power in the hands of the most popular instances; however, the fact it’s rather trivial for other instances to sprout up is its own sort of booster shot against any kind of bullshittery that royally effs the users.
Absolutely. Arguably already happening with lemmy.world and mastodon.social depending on your values.
But this is where the open protocol, decentralisation and FOSS platforms kick in. The same or similar platforms can form their own networks or sub-networks with a hopefully high degree of flexibility in what connections are and are not made over the network. IE, enshitification can be routed around easily.
That at least is the aim. If you tune into the right people and conversations on the Fedi, there’s a little bit of concern about the place, IMO, that the current implementation of things, including the protocol itself, maybe is t good enough for this to become a reality. The centrality of instances rather than an architecture with more portable entities and data strikes me as an obviously central issue in this regard.
Personally I’m curious to watch for what happens when BlueSky open up next year and in particular how interested developers get in their system and building on top of it. If developers buy in and their system allows for organic innovation and growth while providing a more robust architecture, then it could be a rather interesting development.
What’s a good mirror instance that is federated with “everybody” to have an account with so you can access all the defederated communities and content if you want for a more liberal account?
deleted by creator
The Fediverse is just Usenet 2.0. The trick will be if its design can keep enshitification at bay.