The draw is supposed to end up being that you can continue to access more or less all of the same content with all of the same functionality regardless of how badly someone might screw up one or another instance.

Back when the big Reddit exodus happened, after the whole API debacle, lemmy.world ended up being far and away the most popular instance, and that hasn’t really been good for it. It’s had a bit of a “Reddit with a different URL” reek to it ever since.

But certainly not coincidentally, its popularity has also waned since, and it already has less of a share of active lemmy users than it had before, which is exactly the way the fediverse is supposed to work. And I would assume that after this last announcement, its popularity is going to take a definite hit.

I recommend trying a bunch of instances. They’re all at least subtly different, and the best way to figure out which one(s) you prefer is to just spend some time with them. Over time, you’ll just come to use one or maybe a couple more than the rest.

And I don’t even bother with any of the apps - the basic mobile version of it is actually quite good.(on Firefox at least - I can’t vouch for any other browsers).

Short version: yesterday, Lemmy.world announced essentially, though they buried it under lots of distracting verbiage, that they were going to follow in the footsteps of Vichy Twitter and Meta and allow hate speech and misinformation, and probably more to the point, they intend to force recalcitrant mods to allow it regardless of their own views on the matter.

And the head mod/creator/whatever they are of unpopular opinion took exception to that and locked the community in protest.

Are they good for anything at all?

No.

They’re a part of the system, so it seems like they need to be a part of the system, but actually it’s that the system has been warped to accommodate them.

Do they push innovation or productivity?

They specifically push it, but if and only if there’s an angle by which they can parasitize off of it. They don’t originate anything. Ever.

Like would a company without these people be crushed by companies with such people…?

Probably.

I figured out long ago that that’s the case on a personal level. The specific way it works:

People competing for a position in a hierarchy have to make decisions that will impact their chances.

People with integrity, morals, ethics, empathy, principles, etc. will have some number of potential options that they simply will not choose. People with none of those things are not so constrained - they’re able to do absolutely whatever it takes to get what they want, entirely regardless of any other condiderations. So all other things being more or less equal, amoral, unprincipled, dishonest, sociopathic pieces of shit actuyallt have a competitive advantage in hierarchies.

I hadn’t before considered whether that’s the case between businesses, but I would assume so.

I’d love to read more about this, but all I can find is always always tainted either by some status quo idea or basing everything on capitalism or dream thinking like communism or anarchism which just doesn’t work because of these kind if people.

I’m actually an anarchist in large part because of all of this, but my anarchism is very much an ideal. There’s absolutely no way that current humanity could manage it on any sort of scale, so when I advocate for it, I’m really just trying to promote the mindset that will make it possible sometime in the future.

I actually think that anarchism will not only one day be possible, but, if humanity survives, it will be inevitable. It’s vessentiallybthe adulthood of society - the point at which collectively - not just situationally and individually - we’ll be able to live without mommy and daddy state making sure we behave.

Can we detect non-empatic people and not allow them to manage people? Would that be a good first step?

I’ve actually said before that if I could leave a message for the people who will end up trying to rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, it would be, “Whatever you do, don’t let psychopaths gain power.”

I think there’s no single thing that anyone could do to improve literally everything that would be more effective than to somehow implement an international effort to identify and isolate sociopaths and psychopaths - that they do more harm to the planet and its people than anything else, and by a considerable margin.

But I don’t see any way it could happen, if for no other reason than that the psychopaths and sociopaths in the relevant positions would prevent it.

Which is exactly why I thought of leaving a message for our heirs, in the hope that they’ll do a better job of it from the start. Which I think is the only real chance humanity has.

Yes.

Enshittification, as Doctorow defined it, is really just a particular version of a much broader dynamic, and it happens, and is happening, to nearly everything on which a profit can be made. And if you expand the definition even more, it actually happens and is happening to nearly everything by which one is rewarded for providing value to others.

Broadly, what happens is that self-serving scumbags gravitate to and come to hold positions of authority in organizations, then arrange things to maximize benefit to themselves. They do that in two general ways - by shaping the organization so that self-serving scumbags like them can prosper, and by chipping away at everything of value that’s offered by the organization while running up prices as much as possible, in order to maximize the benefit to themselves.

Just as it happens, as Doctorow noted, with social media, they depend on market dominance, name recognition, political patronage, regulatory capture and the like to ensure that they can retain their market share even as they offer consistently less value for more money, so they can pocket more themselves. And since the organization is shaped to allow them to get away with that (they deliberately move away from likely earlier held virtues like focusing on quality, value, integrity, and the like - the things for which the organization was rewarded back when they were starting out), steadily more and more self-serving scumbags come to hold positions of authority, and the broad dynamic gets ever more entrenched.

It happens with all consumer goods and services sooner or later, from television to cars to breakfast cereal.

Notably, it also happens wth organizations like charities, advocacy groups and unions - as they become more influential, they can and do shift from providing a service for which they’re rewarded to rewarding themselves ever more by providing ever less actual value.

And though Lemmy won’t like this, it’s not unique to capitalism, since it happens with any hierarchical system from which value is expected and can be derived. In fact, it’s the heart of the reason that state communism so consistently fails - because state communism provides a particularly easy method by which self-serving scumbags can maximize the benefit to themselves by offering as little benefit as possible to those they’re meant to serve and relying on market dominance to ensure that they continue to hold their positions in spite of their general failure to provide anything of value to anyone else.

Broadly, yes - it’s happening to pretty much everything, and has been happening to pretty much everything to which it could happen for all of history, and will continue to. The only way I can see to avoid it is to somehow eliminate self-serving scumbags entirely, so that all that’s left are people who have the necessary integrity to hold to a virtue of providing value to others and only rewarding themselves as they genuinely deserve, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, if ever.