cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/24088740
Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?
Lemmy and Mastodon do give me the hope, that when one platform turns to shit, there will be people creating a platform that - for the time being - is not.
Probably not the same kind of « enshitification », but I think the fediverse creates small communities, and sometimes, it’s difficult / impossible to find non-aggressive communities for some subjects.
It’s not really solving the issues caused by the users themselves, especially when communities are not big enough to justify big moderation teams, and those people have no incentive at all to be « kind » (it’s hit or miss I would say). Instead of 1 big community with good moderation, you can end up with many small communities with little or bad moderation.
I have no solution to propose, it’s probably inherent to the fediverse.
Which subjects do you have in mind? Politics?
Not so serious subjects (I prefer to relax while being on the fediverse :) ). Anything related to Facebook / Apple / Nintendo / Disney is almost always filled with comments full of hate. It is much easier to find good communities for that on Discord for example.
See, in the past, I used a lot Twitter to keep up with news about my interests. It was easy to filter out bad users by banning them, and following more « positive » people. I left when it became « X » because I had less interactions and much more ads (probably a consequence of letting users pay to gain visibility). I hoped the fediverse would replace it.
In a sense it worked, because I get a lot of news. But now, I am worried to read the comments or even comment myself because people are most of the time not kind at all. More specific communities have not this issue, but the fediverse is so small that you are forced to be part of more general communities and face the general harsh talk of most people.
Interesting, I didn’t know Nintendo was so much hated here. I guess their very agressive business model doesn’t work in their favour.
Is it the same on more generic video games communities?
I think it’s even more common among more general communities. But even niche communities like retrogaming can be like that.
Just to give a concrete example, I have seen a post about a pretty cool mod on Zelda ocarina of time where they integrated Pikmin, it has 50+ ups, and a single comment saying they can’t wait for Nintendo to shut it down. What’s the point ? And I see this more and more. It’s not the minority but the majority of the replies I see on such posts. It’s not healthy at all.
Based on Nintendo’s past with mods, it seems reasonable to imagine they’ll do it.
I post a lot on [email protected], I know that if it’s a Star Wars show people are going to be critical of the way the license is managed, and thé subpar quality of the recent productions.
Thankfully there are other shows that are good, but I can get the criticism against such companies. Disney recently had the backlash with the allergic person they tried to use a Disney+ contract clause against, this kind of moves can hit your image