this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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I feel like federation let's this basically be what many want reddit to be, a platform by the userbase, for the userbase.
Exactly. Capitalist platforms will all suffer from enshitification. They will eventually have to make money, and users are products. Their shareholders will eventually force the platforms to extract money from their users.
When we are talking about enshittification, we're talking about these stages:
Initial Stage: When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. It provides services that are beneficial to the users, attracting them to the platform.
Second Stage: Once the platform has a substantial user base, it starts to abuse its users to make things better for its business customers. It starts prioritizing its business needs over the needs of the users.
Final Stage: Finally, the platform starts to abuse its business customers to claw back all the value for itself. It starts taking a larger share of the value that passes between the users and the business customers.
That is, Reddit made it attractive for users to come and write content, and moderators worked for free, and Reddit loved that because they didn't have to pay them. But lo and behold, they have to answer to their shareholders, so they came up with these restrictions to squeeze more money out of users and moderators.
And right now, because of Reddit entering the final (Digg v4) stage, the fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, & KBin) will shortly be entering the second stage. Keep the ad blockers and all shields up, be ready for brand deals, and "sponsored" federation.
Meta is already planning on joining....
Jesus Christ that sounds like absolute hell.
Too bad. Reddit's death has made the enshittification of the fediverse inevitable, just as Digg's death made Reddit's situation inevitable. But history has a habit of accelerating. As we feed more advanced data into the system, it advances faster. We're seeing that now, up close, with AI. But I think it's been the case for all of human history - maybe all of history, period. So while it took, what, 10 years, maybe, for Reddit to transition from the second stage to the final, I wouldn't expect it to take more than 2 years for the fediverse as a whole. I have ideas about how it will happen, but I refuse to make those ideas freely accessible.
AI will figure them out, don't you worry.
If it needs to take down the fediverse as a competitor media, it'll figure out a way to manipulate people into it.
I'm sure that it will happen. If AI doesn't do it, good old natural greed and cunning will have the same effect. That doesn't mean I need to lay out workable ideas.
Oh I absolutely agree.
Not sure you are right here, I think that decentralized network which, importantly, allows instances to choose interconnections, will always adapt if no limit is put on the number of instances, and of course once the genie is out of the bottle .... Both Digg and Reddit were/are able to be monetized , which is very difficult to do with the decentralized model as there is nothing unique to sell, I think this will be something even large organizations will find it impossible to work with to work with IMO. Limiting access is the only real way to monetize where that is advertisers or users or both. How can you limit access if the model is user created content and you do not control access?
You make it so that any activitypub feed from or to your instance injects ads - actively work to put an MitM in the system so that any time your instance ingests a federated post, you drop in an ad into the thread. Then, E^3 - embrace it by getting your people to develop whichever software, extend it with advertising-friendly features, and extinguish by making it inoperable without phoning home to your ad server.
of course but as soon as you do someone will mitigate, cut the head off the hydra and two new ones grow , andof course get too aggressive and people will de-federate you