Was just browsing my favorite communities, commenting on posts I found really interesting, and engaging with other users who wanted to have conversations.
… and not a single paid ad in my feed. I effing love this platform.
Was just browsing my favorite communities, commenting on posts I found really interesting, and engaging with other users who wanted to have conversations.
… and not a single paid ad in my feed. I effing love this platform.
Eh, I’m worried that success will bring out the worst in people. I’m of the opinion that SM doesn’t suck because SM companies suck, but that SM sucks because people suck when in large groups. See Bystander Effect and Bandwagon Effect.
But I guess that’s a good problem to have, we can’t come up with solutions until we actually get a chance to try.
I think your worry about large groups of people is warranted. I do think that the Fediverse has the best chance of anywhere to overcome it, though. No algorithms and only mods/admins to contend with. I how that extra freedom will promote better problem-solving.
Hopefully. It’s certainly an interesting experiment, and I’m here for it.
I disagree that people suck.
I think that enshittification on any SM platform, whether free and open, or built for commerce, happens when companies try to exploit it for commercial gain.
Take Usenet for example: At the beginning it was great, then spammers found they could post unlimited spam across the newsgroups for free, and it became shit, barring a few groups where mods had to work very hard to weed out the spam to keep them readable, but eventually collapsed, and people moved on to the new platforms.
Reddit, was built for ads and tracking its users to start with, so the gradual creep of enshittification was no surprise there.
And now we have nation-state backed disinformation campaigns to deal with in addition to commercial spam.
I could see Lemmy and the Fediverse in general taking a similar path to Usenet, if the devs, admins, and mods aren’t vigilant about keeping bad actors out.
I like the Fediverse’s guarantor feature for adding new instances, but we’ll have to see how well it holds up under assault from spammers.
Or when individuals exploit it for personal gain (influencers, resumes, etc), political interest groups exploit it for political gain, state actors exploit it for national security reasons, etc. Just look at less popular subreddits on Reddit and you’ll see a huge propensity toward echo chambers and manipulating people into thinking a certain way.
So yeah, people suck in large groups. Sometimes it’s regular people doing the sucking (e.g. bystander effect when some choose to gaslight/bully others), and sometimes it’s highly motivated groups of people doing the sucking (spam, misinformation, etc). But the larger the community gets, the more moderation is needed to counter the suck, and moderators themselves can add to the sucking.
I think the fediverse will struggle once it gets past a certain size, but hopefully I’m wrong. In the meantime, I (and probably others) are working on alternatives, so hopefully we’ll have solutions if the fediverse doesn’t work as expected.