• BobQuasit@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?

    It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.

    • sw4nky@lemmy.one
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      2 years ago

      Theoretically some large company could use the “embrace, extend, extinguish” model to take over “open” standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:

      1. Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users

      2. Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances

      3. Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.

      • C4Phoenix@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though “Email” is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn’t that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.

    • luna@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      We’re kind of already seeing it with Mastodon. The official app strongly pushes people toward mastodon.social which is a radioactive dumpster fire. And this isn’t even corporate America, it’s just the folks who own the name.

        • luna@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          The biggest issue is that they don’t really moderate, so hate speech and bigotry have a greater presence there. I specifically remember a situation where multiple people were reporting things and it took them days (maybe a week or more? I can’t remember, but certainly several days) to take it down. And this happens pretty regularly.

        • luna@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Your points are valid and you’re not wrong, but it’s exacerbated by the poor / lack of moderation as I commented elsethread. You can have a large number of users and still have a tolerable, even useful and pleasant, experience–r/askhistorians is my favorite example of internet moderation.

      • luna@beehaw.org
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        2 years ago

        Apple’s iChat (precursor to Messages.app) used to do XMPP, too. I don’t think it federated, or if it did it was very short-lived, but all the big tech companies with chat services got their start with XMPP. It’s almost like it’s a great set of tools for communicating, which, sadly and ironically, open source tech seems to have moved on from. To be fair, I far prefer Matrix’s JSON to XMPP’s XML, but it’s a little disappointing that everyone forgets about XMPP.

    • CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org
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      2 years ago

      It could absolutely happen here! But the nice part is that people can choose to engage with it. Whereas with reddit, you’re forced to engage with capitalism. Don’t want ads here? Switch servers and donate to a smaller one.