this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
273 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37712 readers
248 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?
It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.
Theoretically some large company could use the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model to take over "open" standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:
Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.
They should officially add a fourth "E" to that model - Enshittification.
Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though "Email" is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn't that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.