Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can’t even imagine at this moment in time.
There is nothing too complex for the ingenuity of advertisers to corrupt eventually.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it’s up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
IMO, all it takes is a company or companies willing to invest in their own large, stable instances that work in a way digestible to the masses. If they get large enough, they can choose to only federate with each other in an attempt to choke out smaller imstances, or only federate with instances that allow ads, etc.
With that said, people add “reddit” to their google search so they can get information from actual people, free of shilling. People find value in “ad free.” People value wikipedia. As services like lemmy continue to develop, I’m hoping the UX and on boarding become more palatable to the layuser, growing the population and getting people used to the whole concept and its value, so when the big money backed instances start up, they’ll notice the difference.
The costs of the servers will crush a lot of instances. I can’t imagine the hosting costs the main kbin and lemmy instances have right now, and it’ll only go up as people join in. I think we’ll see server managers start asking for donations to cover the costs sooner and frequently. And when people don’t donate, they’ll have to resort to ads. And if an instance is really popular but barely afloat, some big fish comes along and offers to buy it from them for a decent price. Classic strategy.
Meta may say it wants to start its own instance, but just wait until they see how most instances have refused to federate with them and they’ll be sniffing around one of the popular instances trying to buy or offering a nice package to federate. By then, users will be established and not leave immediately.