There’s a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.

The “Serfs had it better” trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.

I don’t agree. But I can’t really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.

So you’re not really a serf if you’ve got plumbing? The labor relationship with your employers isn’t the issue?

The dark cowboy rides again.

If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.

Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances

You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.

Are they? I see the comments still full of them.

Making all my toy cars out of plastic not because I’m cheap but because I’m authentic.

Stuff doesn’t get cheaper, only more profitable. Trump will subsidize stock prices while the price of eggs and milk continue to climb.

Things were better before they got worse, sure.

But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.

People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either

The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.

Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.

BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.

Do you think the same about lemmy?

I think it depends on how the federated sites are administered going forward. We’ve already seen bigger sites - like Threads, for instance - try to integrate into the overall ecosystem. And I could see a future in which one of the larger instances - a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren’t tech savy…

I’m reasonably tech savvy and even I’d struggle to tell you exactly how it works. How is .world hosted? Is it load-balanced or otherwise optimized? Who controls registration and which other instances does it integrate with? How do you find a list of active instances to federate against? Who do you even talk to in order to federate with another instance? What does the API look like and which instances allow you to crawl them? How do bots integrate with the environment and what can an admin do to limit them? No idea.

There’s a bunch of things I think I should be able to do but I can’t. For instance, signing into .world but only surfing content that’s hosted on .sh.itjust.works.

There’s also a lot of petty politics. Admins deciding on a whim who to block, whether it be individuals or whole instances. Waking up one day and suddenly not having access to a dozen of my favorite subs, because two admins are feuding, is not particularly fun. I never have a problem like that on BlueSky or Instagram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).

A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.

2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We’ll see how long that lasts.

refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

:-/

I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.

Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.

Put enough zeros on the end of a check and it will be.

Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.

Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).

The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.

Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.

The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.

The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.