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.
Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.
So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.