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I don't think decentralisation is the solution because the problem is as much the lack of central authority as the presence of it. Enshittification happens fast
by lmm 2y ago
I don't think decentralisation is the solution because the problem is as much the lack of central authority as the presence of it. Enshittification happens fastest on platforms that are run by committees, who know they need revenue so take the path of least resistance, without a single clear owner who can resist it. Look at Google's decline since its founders left, compare to Facebook which - say what you like about it - is much the same user experience that it always was. (Hell, look at MySpace for an even more dramatic turndown than Google)
Social media sites that are still founder-owned or have strong individual leaders can continue fine (consider e.g. Dreamwidth). Though I guess whether you can sustain that past one person's lifetime is another question.
- Zak 2y agoThis comment discusses only centralized services. Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users. ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and Pixelfed among others is an example of such a protocol. BlueSky's ATProto is another, though it's in an earlier stage without mature third-party implementations and service providers. Email, too is decentralized, though it may serve as a cautionary tale; spam, attempts to block spam, and feature stagnation have all degraded the user experience considerably.
- dingnuts 2y agodecentralization just multiplies the problem. instead of a gargantuan overlord, a million fiefdoms. it's no wonder that the fediverse is most active on the fringes, especially outside of tech bubbles who use it because they like the idea
- Zak 2y agoI think this is part of what ATProto is trying to solve by decoupling identity provider, data provider, and labeling. That's not to say a million fiefdoms is necessarily a bad approach. A small server where all the members know each other is much more likely to be run in a way that's satisfactory to all its members than a big one. Furthermore, users have the option to maintain multiple accounts.
- lmm 2y ago> Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users. And? I guess that somewhat hinders enshittification just by making it hard for the platform to ever evolve at all. But the cure is worse than the disease, you can't ever build something new that way nor can you really improve something that has any level of traction. Look at how IRC users revolt when you try to fix even the most glaring problems.
- vidarh 2y agoMastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, Pixelfed are all very different, with different feature sets, supporting the same basic protocols, and evidence you can build something new on distributed protocols. ActivityPub dictates how to meditate relationships between activities on collections of objects, and a few default objects types. It's specifically designed to let you "subclass" (not really inheritance, and more composition as you give a list of types with no enforced hierarchy) objects so you can create new object types nobody else understands but still give them another type that allows them to carry out basic operations on it. It's not perfect but it's far from as dire as you make out.
- Zak 2y agoSo far the situation with ActivityPub is that the protocol is flexible enough to allow very different feature sets and user experiences. The most popular so far are twitter-like and reddit-like, with multiple implementations of each. I don't think ActivityPub was designed with the reddit-like use case in mind, yet it works well for that. There's no user revolt because the creation of new software with new experiences doesn't have much impact on users of existing software. Enshittification is hindered not because nobody could create a Mastodon fork (or green-field project speaking the same protocol) that's riddled with ads, but because people can select a different service provider and still access the same network.
- lelanthran 2y ago> Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users. In theory, certainly. In practice, one instance dominates and all the other instances have to censor accordingly or die.
- mapt 2y agoCompare to Craigslist, or for a period of five or ten years after its inception, Google Search.