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Are We Watching The Internet Die?
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Technology
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It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.
The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It's not there yet but it's a start.
Let's hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we'll get into a cyclical situation.
*namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.
The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.
When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.
Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.
This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.
Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they're able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:
For example, it's possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I'm just conjecturing though.