An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
I’m not so sure this is a decline of social as much as decline in the control of large corporate interests. Lemmy is getting going well from what I can see. There will be issues but Reddit did as it grew and Twitter made the fail whale meme for their issues. The internet was pretty awesome in the 90s when none of these large companies even existed.
I mean I am excited for the potential the fediverse has, but I do wonder how long until it becomes enshitified too. Every great new invention that serves the needs of the people always goes downhill at some point. Remember that television networks used to be an amazing platform for all our needs.
The nice thing is that if things do become shit on one instance, the rest just disconnect. The lack of total control over the system by one entity ensures that there is no complete capture to enable the enshitification from taking root and destroying what is good about it.
I am hopeful, but I am cautiously sceptical. I remember hearing about cryptocurrency taking off in 2011 and all about how it was decentralized and was immune to corruption etc and then a decade later seeing SBF types in the news.
The difference here is that there is no supposed or even desired value from the people participating here. We’re not all trying to get rich off of this, nor are we trying to replace all forms of communication here like many crypto purists wish would happen with Bitcoin replacing the dollar. Nothing rides on this being a success, perpetual growth isn’t necessary, and defederation doesn’t mean that our communities wouldn’t still have worth to us.
Crypto does have all those benefits, but without wide enough adoption, there’s genuinely nothing valuable about it. Just like real money. It is immune to a certain kind of corruption (manipulating the money supply) but very weak to another kind (making your own worthless currency to scam people with).
Even if we got society to go full crypto acceptance, governments would do all they can to control it. Manipulating the money supply is how you get every politician’s favorite thing ever; an economy fueled through the debt of future generations.
The fediverse has the same conceptual benefits and the same problem of needing large groups of people to grow, but there is a big difference: having spaces for online communication not controlled by single actors is valuable in and of itself. Whether enough people find it valuable enough to participate is up to them, but the concept, at least, is incredibly appealing especially at this current moment.
deleted by creator