This isn't a business. All these instances are hosted by volunteers and nobody is accountable to any shareholders.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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If that's the case then what does Eugen Rochko do? Or is it like Linux where Linus Torvalds works on Linux every day but doesn't actually own or control things that are based on Linux (such as Android)?
Mastodon and others are FOSS, yes. People either volunteer their hours or are paid by an interested party/company to work on FOSS projects, but in both cases they release their work for free to everyone. Even if they start corrupting their codebase to appease corporate sponsors, the community can fork the project and keep it going without the original developers' influence. E.g. it doesn't matter if Eugen gets a railroad spike through the head and decides that putting ads on Mastodon is a good idea, we will fork the project and continue on without them.
This makes sense - Thank you so much!
Two reasons:
- Lemmy admins aren't accountable to investors or shareholders so there's no pressure to make things worse.
- If enhsittification happens on any instance. Like it's owned by a cooperation. Then other instances can block it/defederate, or users can move to another instance
Both of these reasons only remain true if Lemmy stays small.
Imagine GIMP is enshitified somehow. Well that won't work because the source code is available and people will just create a fork and work with that instead.
There's many Lemmy and Mastodons servers AND clients out there, being open source is already one thing add federation on top and you see no one really is in control of Lemmy or Mastodon as a whole.
Is Gimp as fragmented as Lemmy? If I want to use the blue tool do I have to use Gimp A, and crop Gimp B? With Lemmy entire genres could just disappear if my iteration defederates with the interaction that hosted all the interesting topics. If that happens then the community all gets split up among other communities which likely will never come back whole again. It’s the Linux model, which is fine for longevity and availability, but it’s not good for keeping like minded people together. Fragmentation might be fine for a tool, but it’s not great for community.
Kind of like our worlds nations!
Imagine websites only had content from people in your own country. That would be awful.
How so? If the platform gains more adoption what could happen? Say lemmy.world grows too large and goes completely off the rails, many of us are already happy on other instances.
And if we don't like the route the lemmy devs take? Someone will fork it. Look at kbin, sole dev is going through some stuff and now [mbin is a thing] (https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin)g and fedia already switched over.
We:re in a much better position here.
Costs rise exponentially as sites get larger. Moderation becomes more important, more team members have to come on board, overhead, etc.
From a platform standpoint, sure, it won’t go away. But the platform is meaningless without communities, and a system built to easily dismantle communities is questionable at best for longevity. This is my third or fourth Lemmy-esk account due to a random assortment of annoying issues. Any number of instances could defederate from mine and I’d be forced to either move again or miss out on content I’m used to. There’s no guarantee user names will be available everywhere, so I find the prospects for community building extremely suspect long term.
Uhm... costs don't rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don't have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
More people, more resources. More people, more moderation. More people, more problems. More time consuming. More admins, more time to make decisions. And so on.
Yea but that's not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. That means the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
I mean in the initial growth phase. Yes it will eventually flatten out, but the way Lemmy is run atm won't likely do that unless it stays small.
Talking about exponential growth in the early phase makes even less sense, because exponential curves actually grow very slowly at the beginning while projects usually start out with substantial initial costs to get things going. And nothing about the way Lemmy is run indicates that it won't flatten out or doesn't flatten out already, I really have no idea why you would think that.
Maybe “snowballs” is a better metaphor. Point is, the way an instance is run today (1 person, maybe a small team dealing with everything) isn’t sustainable through growth without outside money coming in. The counter I keep hearing is to essentially keep that instance small, but number of users isn’t the only problem. More content needing to be processed is. And keeping things small and or having performance problems is not something that will help community building.
How would someone buy Lemmy? Even if they bought one instance it could just be forked
Because instances getting larger are going to incur exponentially larger costs. If the largest communities start suffering from performance issues or something like that, it fragments the community into who knows how many instances the community will be split into. The only problem Lemmy has is lack of users and engagement, and I think it’s actually flawed by design in this way. It’s like having a big party, but instead of everyone in one house you split it into a bunch of them with not that many people or food options. Idk if that’s ideal or not.
For us over at Hexbear that's a feature, not a bug. Our instance exists explicitly because we don't want to be subjected to the political moderation of others.
Lemmy can always stay small. If an instance is getting too bogged down, they can close sign ups and people will find other instances. Federation helps spread the load.
Check out the business lifecycle. "Enshittification" occurs after a business reaches maturity and has to squeeze more money out of its users or decline. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are all businesses, so they follow this cycle - Lemmy and Mastodon are not so they do not. That's not to say that bad moderation can't crater a user base, but it's not inevitable like it is with businesses.
Yeah not to use the same metaphor everyone seems to use but email didn't go through "enshittification" and like fax machines didn't, even though fax died out, because it's a feature of the business cycle, not a feature of technological innovation.
What if I told you it was more than just the business cycle
What if I told you the entire economic structure acted like this 
That's because email and fax machines aren't businesses either. However commercially run email providers def go through this process.
If you're using "enshittification" the same way Cory Doctorow does, then the key is reducing the cost of moving to alternatives. Once a platform has a captive market then they can start taking advantage of consumers and advertisers.
It's entirely possible that the Lemmy and Mastadon instances you join will become awful, but because anyone can host an instance and consume content from whichever instances they want the switching costs are essentially 0.
Support for ActivityPub is, in my opinion, an important component because it allows for a standardized way to consume content from social media networks. Imagine being able to leave Twitter, but you're able to bring everyone you want to follow with you because their posts can be consumed using a standardized interface.
This makes sense, thanks!
For sure! Cory is much more articulate than me. If you have 45 minutes I recommend watching his Defcon keynote
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Good bot
That's why adding the ability to move accounts and entire communities between instances should be a top priority imo.
The key is decentralization, if an instance gets wonky, it can be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. Or at least sections of it. I suspect in the future there will be "blobs" of instances with little to no interaction with other blobs.
The profit motive isn't there. Enshittification is, for lack of a better term, digital rent-seeking behavior. An anticapitalist site is ideologically opposed to the profit motive and is not seeking out profits above all else, as long as it is being properly funded by donations: we have nothing to worry about.
4chan is somewhat similar, 4chan is not a business and isn't looking for a profit. But I get the feeling there is no shortage of megachurches or Koch industries funding the site.
The absence of the profit motive.
This is the whole point of federation, having multiple instances, and being open source. It's also why a bunch of the people on here are Linux heads.
Keep on mind that lemmy isn't owned by a single corporation ir organization. It is a bunch of individually owned instances that talk to each other. This means that if you own an instance, you have contr of how it is moderated, but you have to balance that freedom with making your instance a place other instances will have to connect to. Its very democratic.
This goes all the way to the source code, which is open. So, even if the devs try to change it and exert more control, it could be forked.
Of course, you could still be a doomer and say something could come along and ruin it. But, it's at least better than private, venture funded internet platforms on paper.
lack of pressure from investors to make a return
It's multiple websites. If admins of lemm.ee (for example) make some awful choices users will jump ship to another instance, still using the same app, and still subscribing to most of their communities.
Since when is Lemmy "a website"?
All these r*dditors flooding lemmy still haven't figured out federation lmao.
I'm sure there are more but here's a few off the top of my head:
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The ability to defederate from any instance that tries. truthsocial.com and gab.com are based on Mastodon, and they're cut off from the Fediverse because they're "downhill" to put it lightly. If the instance you're on starts acting funky you can just pack up and leave. If Facebook starts asking for your driver's license where are you going to go? There is no other Facebook, and your friends wouldn't be there if there was.
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The ability/culture for users to donate to their instance admins. Your instance admin should transparently list all their costs and donations, so everyone is aware how much is needed to cover infrastructure. Not counting volunteer hours, it's very cheap to run these servers as long as the average person kicks in a buck every so often. The amount an average person needs to donate is probably like 5-10 cents a month, which can easily be covered by generous patrons. I personally donate about $10/month to my instance, which is way overkill and probably covers a significant chunk of their operating expenses (not that they need my money, I'm sure).
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No inherent need for people to use the software. No one is making money from higher site activity time, there's no need to have black box algorithms that try to keep you engaged by promoting ragebait etc
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Decentralized nature makes it impossible to "buy it out". Technically a company could probably coerce an existing Fedi server to sell so they can start causing chaos, but they can't just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user. Spread out among the servers and protections will only grow stronger.
but they can’t just drop $44 billion and nonconsensually steal the website from every user.
Thanks for the detailed response! Sorry for the dumb question but: Why can't someone buy Eugen Rochko's company for $44 billion?
Way outside my wheelhouse so take the following with a grain of salt, but TMK the company that "owns" Mastodon is a non-profit LLC named Mastoton gGmbH and probably isn't technically worth anything by itself. Not that they would ever sell to you, but by purchasing, you wouldn't own the codebase or any of the instances. The community would immediately fork the codebase, most of the members of the Mastodon gGmbH would leave and reincorporate as a new entity and continue their work on the codebase, and life would go on without much of a hitch.
Edit: Here is the official post that Mastodon made about registering as a gGmbH, which includes some important info about how a gGmbH works, and how it includes some some restrictions that really prevent any value from being extracted out of a potential purchase.
This makes sense, thanks!
The people running the instances (currently) don't run their sites as a business.
The federated protocol itself makes no difference; lemmy.world is a good 70% of the content and could essentially run this part of the fediverse if it wanted to, as it is close to a monopoly already.
Thankfully, they aren't greedy owners. They are fine with it "losing money" and not running ads and such.
given a long enough timespan enshitrification is 100% likely, but given the same timespan only the people who pay the bills will be using it, everyone else will have long since left for the "new big thing"