If Facebook and Reddit and Twitter are all going downhill, what leads people to believe that websites like Mastadon or Lemmy won’t go the same way eventually?
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
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.
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.
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.
