like how the profit seeking stewards forced people to leave reddit and twitter (and bluesky in the future); the liberal bubble stewards have pushed lemmings away and onto the few minority instances that still remain federated and once lemmy’s code base is forked those minority instances will become a digital cuba or venezuela; ostracized and obscured leftist islands, but without a china or brics that could ever change this status quo.

I find Mastodon is avoiding this problem at least so far…

so too has bluesky… so far

my view is that social media platform enshitification is spurred on for multitudes of reasons and most of them have been around profit motives so far.

reddit began to enshitify as it grew more centralized out of a need to maintain its sizeable userbase and before their profit motive became central to their strategy; as evidenced by their multiple userbase diasporas in the last decade+ before the reddit blackout protest over api fees.

twitter, facebook, et al. have gone through similar diasporas and their expat users are centralizing around other platforms, including fediverse instances, that use their new found leverage from their equally new found majorities to take actions, like defederations, that remind us that there’s always new ways to enshitify.

the fediverse’s design handles well the form of enshitification that comes from profit motives; but the last 30 years proves that there’s multiple forms of enshitification and i think we’re going to learn new forms of enshitification from centralizing examples like mastodon or .world or .ee who will use the leverage given to them by thier relatively gargantuan userbase sizes to dictate the future trajectory of both the fediverse and the lemmyverse.

The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.

it’s been happening for longer than 20 years and; OH BOY; HOW I WISH that people could see that how this type of convincing permeates everything we see and do.

We’ve all seen what happens when social media platforms treat users as a commodity rather than a community.

Creators who built entire careers on centralized platforms, only to see their reach strangled and manipulated by “bonus” programs and algorithms.

Friends and networks erased overnight by corporate priorities and billionaire egos.

Whole communities forced into digital exile because they didn’t fit the new monetization strategy.

this has been happening since the days of bbs and icq; the only thing that has changed is the increased granularity of the scope of the wrecking balls that they unleash on their users in search of profit and the people flocking to other centralizing hubs like bluesky or even mastodon will have to repeat this history.