No one needs to buy Lemmy to enshitify it. All of the above and many more methods would result in a shit experience.
Ibuthyr
Couldn't they "convince" instance admins to include ads? Couldn't they flood communities with influencers? Couldn't they promote Lemmy apps that have ads?
You are severely underestimating the criminal energy and creativity of these corporations.
Edit: reddit turned to shit way before the platform itself was up for sale. No need to buy the platform, bots and influencers are enough.
Absolutely! I fear it's too late for many boomers but the younger generations are in desperate need of this. In Germany a lot of younger people are voting for Nazis because they have the cooler TikTok content. It's a total shitshow. Our schools are garbage regarding this. I know this because my wife is a teacher and she's the only one taking this seriously in her school. All of her colleagues don't see the need. It's really bad unfortunately.
You went ahead and actually gathered the correct information. This is not what the "normies" in question do. Look, I didn't coin the term nor do I approve of the use of this term. I just wanted to explain what the other person meant with "normification".
I think it would make discussions about US politics even worse. But I agree with the rest. I personally would also like to have a more broad user base. That'd definitely spark more interesting discussions. Lemmy is a very weird echo chamber right now. It's just very important that no one in the Fediverse starts to capitalize on them. That'd be the moment enshittification starts. And that will happen once the mainstream people come pouring in because greed will always corrupt the ones who have some form of power. Someone will take advantage of this.
I didn't coin the term and I too believe it's a huge generalization. However, "simpler" people are more susceptible to ads. The "normies" in question are the ones that don't use adblockers, they believe ads are normal and they believe ads don't affect them. Corporations capitalize on that. Better tech education would definitely help take some power away from corporations.
Edit: even now you'll find people that use Lemmy apps that have ads. The bigger the user base, the more greedy companies will find ways of exploiting the Fediverse.
It's what happened to the internet. Devices were dumbed down to make the internet accessible for everyone. Now the "normies" are also on the internet, whereas in the past they'd belittle you for spending time on the computer.
In time, the Fediverse will also be easily accessible. And where there are normies, you'll find corporate enshittification.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes because I explained the word "normification". You're overthinking this. It's a term that has been around since before Reddit became popular. It's a term that stems from 4chan. I don't like the term, I just explained it. And yes, the corpos are to blame but they couldn't do the things they do without a certain user base. And that's not your typical tech savvy user base. How is that so difficult to understand?
What annoys me about Lemmy, at least with the communities and instances that I'm connected to, is that it is a really bad echo chamber for left / far-left techies. It's not exactly representative of what is going on in the world. Don't get me wrong , I prefer a left mindset. But I believe this is dangerous to a certain degree. I'm starting to think I should go back to forae. This whole social bullshit disguised as a news-aggregator is just exhausting.
I never had a twitter account. The entire premise was dumb to begin with. The only way I came in contact with twitter was when shitty journalists just took tweets and used them as a story. But that's more of a journalism problem than anything else.
Paying to have your data stolen and sold sounds like a shit deal. Just use one of the many 3rd party apps for YouTube and Stremio for streaming. Fuck all those greedy shits. I support a select few content creators either via Patreon or their own website (Viva+), the rest can go fuck off. The internet was better when people made videos for shits and giggles. The best memes came from that era.
This is my exact setup and couldn't be happier with it.
I mean, comparing that to coal isn't a very impressive feat. Nuclear power is very expensive, fission material is limited and sourced from dodgy countries, storage is difficult etc. The emissions are the only good thing about it. There are good alternatives to that. I guess using the existing ones until they need to be decommissioned is still a good idea though.