For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
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.
I fully expect bluesky to go the way of twitter eventually. Even though the protocol is somewhat decentralized, the reality is that there’s already one main instance and that’s where majority of users will end up. It’s still an oligarch owned and profit driven platform at its core.
I do think the situation with the fediverse is fundamentally better because the profit motive isn’t the driving factor. And yes, we do have big liberal bubbles here too, but that’s just an artifact of the fact that liberalism is still the dominant ideology in the west. It’s not surprising that they will be the majority on any western social platform.
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.
You can’t solve what’s fundamentally a social problem with technology alone. Technology is simply a piece of the bigger picture where it can provide forums like this where genuine organic communication can happen without it being mediated by corporate interests. However, the shift in the Overton window is ultimately driven by the material conditions. As the standard of living continues to deteriorate in the west, more and more people end up falling out of liberal mainstream. We see this process happening at an ever accelerating rate now.