cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/24088740
Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have. There currently is not financial incentive like the ones that have led centralized platforms to enshittify. But there might be in the future. Does decentralization protect against that tendency in some way?
Lemmy and Mastodon do give me the hope, that when one platform turns to shit, there will be people creating a platform that - for the time being - is not.
I think it’s even more common among more general communities. But even niche communities like retrogaming can be like that.
Just to give a concrete example, I have seen a post about a pretty cool mod on Zelda ocarina of time where they integrated Pikmin, it has 50+ ups, and a single comment saying they can’t wait for Nintendo to shut it down. What’s the point ? And I see this more and more. It’s not the minority but the majority of the replies I see on such posts. It’s not healthy at all.
To be fair, it’s to be expected. Because other platforms have muscle from those companies (Nintendo is basically from the land of the Yakuza, and they do behave as such towards their customers) so that commentary on their stuff in those platforms is sanitized or corporationized. On lemmy you can, for the most part, comment on how you really feel about a corporation.
I do not disagree about the fact that people are free to say what they want. It’s just that, as a user appreciating Nintendo, I am facing very negative comments on most (if not all) subjects even when Nintendo is not doing anything (like my example above about a romhack). For some people, it seems like it’s not about expressing your opinion about the subject, but your opinion about Nintendo on any subject merely mentioning Nintendo.
And it’s like that for many companies (Nintendo is just one example). As a consequence, I do not participate at all (I am just reading the news, trying to avoid the comment section). It’s not very healthy, and I hardly believe people discovering the fediverse will stay long if most messages they see are hating comments about what they like.
Based on Nintendo’s past with mods, it seems reasonable to imagine they’ll do it.
I post a lot on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, I know that if it’s a Star Wars show people are going to be critical of the way the license is managed, and thé subpar quality of the recent productions.
Thankfully there are other shows that are good, but I can get the criticism against such companies. Disney recently had the backlash with the allergic person they tried to use a Disney+ contract clause against, this kind of moves can hit your image