This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
I’m under the impression that over time, isolated social media sites may all fall victim to the same patterns. It’s not so much that I want reddit to fail, it’s that I see it as doomed to eventually fail. The whole fediverse things seems like a game-changer for the internet and free speech.
I agree that’s a plausible scenario, and maybe even most likely given the pattern of history. And I understand and appreciate that you’re not hoping or advocating for that outcome, but highlighting its likelihood.
I also agree with your sentiment that the fediverse seems like a game-changer, particularly in the area of free speech.
Decentralization -> centralization -> corporatization -> enshittification
The federation will fall victim to that too, eventually. But hopefully by then we’ll have something else we can turn to.
I could be wrong since I’m still new to this, but the federation is an amorphous blob that could theoretically continue to avoid centralization. This should be the aim, and honestly this aim should probably be kept lowkey because that could hasten something like “SOPA 2024: This is why we can’t have nice things.”
The way I envision it happening is
Either a company creates an instance, or an existing instance needs to start introducing ads to pay for server maintenance. Either way, the concept of profit is introduced.
Instance starts explicitly trying to draw users to them for the purpose of ad revenue
Ad instance becomes large with a ton of content
Ad instance starts selectively defederating with smaller, independent communities. Probably citing “trolls” and “hate speech”, because who wants to be federated with an instance that has trolls and hate speech?
Ad instance introduces a “trusted federation” model, again (wink wink) to combat “trolls” from other instances (conveniently, instances that are not run by corpos and filled with ads)
Eventually there is one big instance with a ton of content (and ads, and doomscrolling, and lootboxes, and other tricks to keep people going back) and a bunch of smaller independent instances that aren’t allowed to federate with the big one
Either laws get passed or ISPs crack down or server hosters begin to deny server space to smaller servers…again, the easiest way to get this to happen is to start crying about “trolls” and “hate speech” and “pedophilia” and anything else they can convince the majority is lurking around on these smaller instances
Instances that aren’t part of the “trusted federation” model get legislated or policied into non-existence
Centralized Fediverse.
This is the part where the scenario breaks down, IMO. Some of the biggest and most litigious companies on Earth aren’t able to stop torrent sites from being hosted, how would “laws get passed” to prevent independent Fediverse servers? Why isn’t Reddit doing that right now, given that it’s basically the “single large server” you’re describing here?
It’s already happening. SESTA / FOSTA for example.
Those were passed in 2018. They don’t seem to have had much effect on Reddit in the past five years, and don’t seem to be particularly broad in their applicability to online fora in general.
Oh man. I’m not sure how to say this, but you’re very uninformed. They’ve had a massive effect on the internet in general. I’m going to guess you don’t really watch, read, or listen to porn? Or participate in online dating communities? Or know what happened to tumblr, or that time OnlyFans tried to get rid of porn, or the pornhub purge of amateur content? Or about the way backpage shut down, and craigslist killed their personals sections?
But yes, a lot of it has been “behind the scenes” because sex-positive spaces are very easy to drum up witch hunts against. As designed, of course.
But it doesn’t have to be limited to “sexual deviants”. Anything that’s culturally out of favor can become the excuse to remove content. Take the laws in several Southern states banning critical race theory in schools, for example. Because it’s “hurting the children”.
How exactly does the instance with ads become large enough to set terms and defederate other instances out of existence?
People don’t really prefer ads. They can just use federated instances to access any content without seeing ads. The communities themselves can join another ad free instance.
Historically, using vc money to grow without ads. Plus selling user data. Once they’re big enough, they ramp up the ads.
They will probably be defederated when they start getting VC money. They may try to hide it but if the money is supposed to help them dominate it will be difficult to do.
Let’s say they have the money. How are they going to use it to dominate?
Just having better hardware? That would only be attractive if the rest of lemmy cannot handle the traffic. In that case lemmy would be doomed anyways. Paying people to post stuff and drive activity? People will talk and the whole business case is you don’t pay for content, users provide it for free. Same arguments apply for hired moderators. Forking the software? Major changes and features without any willingness to contribute back to the project will get them defederated, especially when VC backing becomes know.