Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
Mastodon toot:
Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.
Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM
My take is that the fediverse is nice because it’s still in its pre-enshittification phase. Give it time.
It’s designed to resist corpo capture via interoperability… if it starts enshittifying, hopefully this will allow users to shift over without incurring too much switching cost keeping them in place
So was the united States… Lol. But I’m hoping for better here
I know the theory, but it really just puts enshittification in different hands.
Well, you are using world, which is like the reddit of lemmy
Hopefully its design makes it resistant to enshittification.
Depends… if enshittification just means corporate control and advertising, I have high hopes for the design. If enshittification also includes things like personal insults, echo chambers and gatekeeping, those ships have already sailed as expected.
“Enshittification” has a more specific meaning than just “things getting shitty.” It’s about a product or service being purposefully made worse in order for the company controlling it to extract more profit by means more underhanded and exploitative than just raising the price.
Forum toxicity (sans some algorithm or bot farm egging it on for some nefarious purpose) is categorically a different thing than enshittification.
The Fediverse can’t enshittify in its current state because it’s not controlled by a corporation. In order for it to happen, it would have to be overwhelmed by federating with Threads or something like that.
Alright I understand the distinction now, although I don’t think either kind of degradation creates a worse user experience than the other. I wonder what term will be made up to describe the situation when corporations have spun up their own instances of lemmy etc. and promote them so they attract far more users. Maybe disillusionication?
That is what enshittification means. It is specifically a corporation making it’s product shittier because they’ve cornered the market.
Thanks, silly me assumed a word like “enshittification” would just mean “made shitty”.
The whole point of decentralisation/federation is that it’s enshittification proof. If one services goes bad, users can move away and continue to maintain their network effect.
The fact that we’re not corposlop gives structural resistance to it. Just don’t let us get EEE’d