Doctorow's Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It's basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we're living under now.

I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I'm aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that's less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I'm aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it's vital to the success of Lemmy.

I just posted this in response to a frenetic YouTube video that claimed that the Reddit protest "failed":

Get serious. It was NEVER going to stop the IPO. But it has accomplished something even more important: it has decapitated Reddit. A lot of the most passionate and involved users are gone, and more of them have at least tried Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. Have you checked those sites out? They're FLOODED with Reddit refugees, and the communities there are booming! They're active and vibrant, with great discussions and content.

What's more, they have hope. The members there aren't subject to some psychotic money-grubbing corporation; if any one server goes authoritarian, there's nothing stopping the users there from just moving to another. They'll have the same access and functionality. And frankly, the odds of a Fediverse server going corporate and having an IPO are infinitesimal. It simply wouldn't be worth it, particularly since there's no way they could stop other instances from defederating with them.

So the outcome of the blackout has been twofold: First, Reddit has lost some of it's best. The quality of content there is diminished, and will continue to diminish as poor quality drives users away. And second, the Fediverse alternatives have been given a huge boost. Almost all users of Reddit are now aware of the ugly truths that underlie that service, and that there are alternatives out there.

That's not failure. That's the seeds of success.

And by the way, I think that's one thing we can all do to help bring down Reddit: mention the great alternatives out there as much as possible to spread the word. The more Redditors who learn that they don't have to be a product to be sold by the pound for the stockholder class, the quicker Reddit will fall!

So Reddit management is afraid. Good.

GOOD!

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.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

I was agitating too.

But nobody's dying. Yes, communities are being broken up and fragmented. But the individuals who made up those communities are still there. They still have thoughts and opinions to share. One way or another, they WILL be back.

This has happened many times before. I've seen it. It will happen again. But maybe, this time, the Fediverse will provide a safe home for the best of those communities to be safe here...free from the greed of our psychotic ruling class.

I'd like to see a book suggestion community with a decent number of requests. Something like r/booksuggestions or r/suggestmeabook. Most of what I did on Reddit was recommend books in response to requests.

I wouldn't mind seeing a New England community, either. Or Massachusetts one. I'd start one up, but I don't know if I could handle the moderation responsibilities!

Not so much. I'm an early adopter, so it's not like I haven't been through this fifty million times already.

Very nice! Perhaps it would be a good idea to spell out that you can subscribe to any community in the Fediverse no matter what part of it you signed up on, kbin or any instance of Lemmy?

I know that's not absolutely accurate, but it's close enough.

Okay, I've found a really annoying problem with Lemmy. I'd heard it mentioned before, but now I understand why it's so bad.

I click on "show context" to a reply that someone made to a post of mine. I didn't realize it, but I was instantly in a different instance and logged out of my account. So I couldn't respond. Clicking "back" didn't return me to my instance or log me back in. I had to re-enter my instance all over again.

That's HUGE. I'm sure it would drive away 4 out of 5 users. Please, someone, tell me it's being addressed!

My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called "Books" on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You'd have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.

Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I'm subscribed to the "Literature" community here. It's nice. But it's entirely disconnected from any of the "Books" communities on other instances. I'm not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there's a plan to eventually allow "MultiReddit" style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.

What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I'm not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.

I cannot code. 🫤

But it occurs to me that we need a couple of features - although maybe they already exist.

One is the ability to back up a Lemmy account and download the data.

The other is account portability - the ability to move an account from one instance to another.

But I suspect that #2 might be impossible.

I'm an old-timer who got on the internet in the mid '80s, so I spent a lot of time on usenet. I often miss those days. Usenet was anarchic, but it wasn't subject to the vicissitudes of capitalism. It couldn't be controlled. It was designed to survive nuclear war. We need something like that again.

Hi! I'm not just a Reddit refugee, but an everything refugee. Or at least, that's how it feels. I've been online since the mid-80s, and I've seen platform after platform be acquired and burnt down under me. I'm pretty much used to it by this point.

That doesn't mean I like it.

I'm an old-time geek. Huge bibliophile, particularly fond of old science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, children's books, YA, classics, and humor. Oh, add graphic novels and manga to the list. I'm also a long time tabletop RPG player and GM. My system of choice is the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest 3; my RQ site might be the oldest one still existing. Of course I play other systems as well. I'm into deep role-playing, and would definitely like to find people who are interested in that sort of thing!

My primary activity over on Reddit was recommending books. I have a resource of nearly a thousand book recommendations that I have created over the years. Hoping to be able to make recommendations on Lemmy, too.

What else? I'm a pretty good public speaker, and was an invited program participant (i. e. panelist) at a regional New England science fiction convention for over 25 years. I'm an atheist, but I advocate tolerance and understanding between atheists and theists (and yes, I've done panels on that topic too; they were great).

I was a redhead when I had hair, with a redheaded son. I'm the single divorced father of a newly-adult son. I'm currently unattached. Oh, and I'm apparently demisexual.

I live in Massachusetts, USA. I like cats, cooking, walking, and well-written TV and movies. I've been refining my grilling techniques for about 35 years now, on a lifelong quest to make the perfect burger.

Let it all burn down. Leave nothing for the IPO.

Reddit isn't so much killing itself as rather being killed for money.

This is why I hate capitalism. It ruins everything, including the planet and the future.

Pity we can't have a social media site that's a public service!

It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.

So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That's very limiting.

Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

When I was part of a group searching for alternatives to GoodReads, one of the problems I had a hell of a hard time explaining to some users was the "walled garden" effect. They just couldn't understand why having posts be invisible to search engines and forcing non-members to sign up in order to see posts was the kiss of death when it came to potential growth.