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Reddit to lay off about 5% of workforce
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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.
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:
Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
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.
They should officially add a fourth "E" to that model - Enshittification.
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.
Why is mastodon.social so bad?
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.
I was thinking about experimenting mastodon too. What server so you recommend?
I am not at all qualified to make a recommendation for an instance for you to join, I'm sorry! The server list on the Join Mastodon site has some good servers, some bad.
Thank you
Here is hoping lemmy is easier to moderate and doesnt end up like that.
There are several good mastodon instances, just not mastodon.social. Moderating is hard and you have to actually do it and not be afraid it's censorship. Oh, and not being a fascist helps. I'm beginning to wonder about the mastodon.social admins.
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.
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.
Many of the things that XMPP listed as extensions really should have been part of the core protocol, in my opinion.
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.
Perhaps a cartel of high traffic servers that block others.