Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
For sure… Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content… Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can’t even imagine at this moment in time.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it’s up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
There is nothing too complex for the ingenuity of advertisers to corrupt eventually.