like how the profit seeking stewards forced people to leave reddit and twitter (and bluesky in the future); the liberal bubble stewards have pushed lemmings away and onto the few minority instances that still remain federated and once lemmy’s code base is forked those minority instances will become a digital cuba or venezuela; ostracized and obscured leftist islands, but without a china or brics that could ever change this status quo.

I find Mastodon is avoiding this problem at least so far…

so too has bluesky… so far

my view is that social media platform enshitification is spurred on for multitudes of reasons and most of them have been around profit motives so far.

reddit began to enshitify as it grew more centralized out of a need to maintain its sizeable userbase and before their profit motive became central to their strategy; as evidenced by their multiple userbase diasporas in the last decade+ before the reddit blackout protest over api fees.

twitter, facebook, et al. have gone through similar diasporas and their expat users are centralizing around other platforms, including fediverse instances, that use their new found leverage from their equally new found majorities to take actions, like defederations, that remind us that there’s always new ways to enshitify.

the fediverse’s design handles well the form of enshitification that comes from profit motives; but the last 30 years proves that there’s multiple forms of enshitification and i think we’re going to learn new forms of enshitification from centralizing examples like mastodon or .world or .ee who will use the leverage given to them by thier relatively gargantuan userbase sizes to dictate the future trajectory of both the fediverse and the lemmyverse.

The problem isn’t that the fediverse isn’t viable. The problem isn’t that it’s “too complicated.” The problem is that the giants of Silicon Valley have spent 20 years convincing us that anything outside their control isn’t worth our time.

it’s been happening for longer than 20 years and; OH BOY; HOW I WISH that people could see that how this type of convincing permeates everything we see and do.

We’ve all seen what happens when social media platforms treat users as a commodity rather than a community.

Creators who built entire careers on centralized platforms, only to see their reach strangled and manipulated by “bonus” programs and algorithms.

Friends and networks erased overnight by corporate priorities and billionaire egos.

Whole communities forced into digital exile because they didn’t fit the new monetization strategy.

this has been happening since the days of bbs and icq; the only thing that has changed is the increased granularity of the scope of the wrecking balls that they unleash on their users in search of profit and the people flocking to other centralizing hubs like bluesky or even mastodon will have to repeat this history.

who cares about mars?! i’d be happy just to get him in the sky and let it crash land.

i forget on the same day; i literally keep a log of everything i did that day so i can look it up. lol

my favorite one is: attention to detail

and it means: we’ll nail you for any bug we accidentally discover; but will create many more of our own.

sometimes it feels like they’re doing it on purpose.

yesterday, i asked for it to create a basic rest api authentication function/method and it gave me something back that explicitly disabled ssl and when i asked why; it simply said “oops”.

do we know yet when re-federation will happen?

hence the joking. lol

and my jackpot is bigger than theirs when i finally do get into bios. lol

torvalds is from finland and created linux; i’m joking/implying that the next linux alternative might be created by conditions like these in finland.

maybe one of them will be the next torvalds. lol

that’s why we have 18 year soldiers …

None of the reddit user diasporas made a dent on reddit’s usage, but people did start using other platforms.

Like tiktok’s ban: it’s not going to move people anywhere else because most people have multiple social media accounts thanks to marketing and that’s what this is.

it’s a lesson i’ve learned many times since the days of bbs & icq; but it keeps catching me off guard.

Oh no, but those poor Blue Sky users, when the service becomes even more terrible they might lose all their posts. We must save them from their own bad decisions!"

i wonder why it’s so hard for people to understand this about social media with significant financial backing; it literally happens every 👏 single 👏 time 👏 .

and here i am bieng the pot that’s calling the kettle black since i did tiktok up until monday. lol

you laugh but i’ve literally being doing this for the last three years because my colleagues disregard the IT based overhauls we need to get rid of the bottlenecks from our architecture; but also accept that i have to keep doing it or else our client won’t pay us.

even among the labor aristocracy that we call the tech industry; the software developer petite bourgeoisie makes life needlessly difficult for the IT underclass because they think they know better. lol

bluesky will eventually enshitify like reddit and twitter did and like all social media platforms with investors/financiers behind them always do. (reddit in particular promised not to enshitify at the beginning just like bluesky is promising right now).

be ready to find a new social platform like you had to do with reddit in another 4 to 9 years if you go with bluesky.

even bluesky’s original creator already left bluesky because of the enshitification and helped develop nostr instead to compete with it.

(copy/pasted)