From the new terms:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Looks like FF is on track for enshittification, I (unfortunately and with great sadness) called it last year (and was downvoted for it lol)
Everything will have enshitification. Even Lemmy will eventually have enshitification. It’s all just a matter of getting to a point of popularity to make money off of it.
The way it works is, if some corporation can make money off of a concept, they’ll pump money in, to get things popular. Then once it’s popular, they’ll strip away what made it popular, offer it at a price, and sit back knowing you can’t leave because this is the popular thing.
Reddit is doing this right now, and for the past year. Microsoft has been doing it since at least Windows 95.
The only reason linux hasn’t been enshitified is that nobody with money can see a way to invest in it, control it’s future, invest money to make it popular, and then rug sweep it away for profit. This is why linux will never be popular.
People flock to the thing they’re told to flock to. And they’re only told to flock to the thing that will make the herders money. If there’s no money, there’s no herd, thus no popularity.
how about vlc media player?
Lemmy is FOSS and federated. How could it become enshittified?
Right now, Lemmy has something like 660k accounts, with 65k active users. Worldwide.
I’d say that less than 1% of the world even knows the fediverse exists. There’s probably less than 1000 Lemmy instances.
But lets say elon musk isn’t happy that twitter is bleeding users. So, he buys bluesky, and just makes it twitter2. Or, I guess if twitter is X than bluesky would be Y. And that’s easy enough. Bluesky is basically as centralized as twitter is.
So now people start turning to mastodon. So now musk creates 3 billion mastodon instances. All with bots that schill GOP messaging, and require you to pay for mastodon useage. He doesn’t own mastodon, but he owns his instances, which now comprise 99.9% of mastodons activity. Which now require payment to use.
So now mastodon has the reputation of being a GOP/nazi platform filled with bots. Because remember, his goal isn’t to make mastodon good and retain its users. His goal is to make the alternative even worse than twitter to stop the bleed.
Now just reapply the same process for peertube, and lemmy, and all the other fediverse platforms.
So in theory he could pay tons of money to ruin it, but that wouldn’t be enshittification. The protocol allows server switching without losing contacts and history, so a real exodus from his sock-puppet instances would still be possible. Therefore nobody would be locked into his instances and forced to pay.
No, I’m not suggesting that people on non-elon servers would be forced to pay. I’m saying when 3 billion instances all say you need to pay, and 1000 instances say you don’t, to a society that doesn’t know what an instance is? That will just become known to the average person as “The fediverse is that thing elon musk created. You gotta pay to use it.”
Even though none of that statement is true, perception becomes reality. And sure, your instance COULD block each elon instance one by one. But it’d be faster to defederate from all, and then only federate with non-elon instances.
…but how do you find 1000 instances in a pool of 3 billion?
Enshitification is never about the tech, or the possible. It’s ALWAYS about the money.
Sorry, I just don’t see that happening. “Truth” Social is just a mastodon instance, and yet mastodon still exists. Enshittification is merely the process of giving something for free and rent seeking once it becomes popular. This can’t be done to a protocol.
Reddit ripped that bandaid off for me when I got permabanned for speaking out against Nazis.