Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.

I certainly hope so; I’m on Wolrd, and most of my favorite communities are located on World, but I often find the admins’ decision questionable, and I have just as many reservations about ml. I hope I could put together a good group of communities without either instance, but sometimes it feels like they’re necessary to a good Lemmy experience. But either way, I think you’re right, most instances won’t defederate.

Look, the question was, “Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have.” I gave an answer explaining that I didn’t think Lemmy would enshittify, but pointing out another senerio where Lemmy could collapse. Sorry if you found it too pessimistic, but if you didn’t want to hear negativity, maybe this wasn’t the discussion for you. Also, if your solution is, “make multiple accounts to get around defederation, start your own instance, or GTFO,” that’s going to be a problem for growth, because most users will pick GTFO.

Also, I think hyper-specialized instances will only exacerbate any potential schisms. Tribalism isn’t necessarily political (although that is currently the central conflict on Lemmy). Admins could find divisions over rule enforcement, fediverse philosophy, or just get into good old-fashioned pissing contests. The admins on my instance recently created a real mess with the moderators of their own Vegan community, overriding their moderating decisions and then retroactively changing their own rules to justify it. Now imagine that conflict was between two instances, and you need to make a separate account just to talk about veganism. If anything, it seems like having an eclectic group of communities on each instance would be better than specializing, since admins would really have to consider whether it’s worth cutting their users off from multiple diverse groups over a conflict.

I don’t have the time or interest to do that, and it wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of tribalism that I’m concerned about.

Fair enough, but the point is that the instance would still be cut off from a large portion of most users’ content if it were to defederate from ml or world. And while tankies and centrists libs are the schism developing right now, it seems like that’s a symptom of tribalism people have around instances, which I think could undermine the entire principle of federation in the first place.

sh.itjust.works seems to be doing well, playing nice with world, ml, hexbear, and grad, I just worry that a culture cliqueish I’ve seen so far could keep fracturing Lemmy so it can’t develop a sustainable user base. But as I said, I haven’t been on the platform that long, and this is just my guess of what Lemmy’s version of enshittification might look like after being here a short time.

Right, and as long as I’m wrong about petty tribalism fracturing Lemmy, that’s good. But if your insurance winds up cut off from World or ml because of petty infighting, that will be a problem

Yeah, if I were ever to switch instances, that would probably be my next move. It’s still really small, though. Green Text seems like the only decently sized community.

I’ve only been on this platform for a little less than a year, but my guess is it will be brought down by petty infighting, not financial incentives. World and a few other instances have already decided to defederate from hexbear, and there’s enough tension between World and ml that defederation seems like a real possibility. While the goal may be a decentralized platform, the largest communities are on these two instances, and it they break apart their might not be enough content to keep new users’ interest.

Even if Lemmy gets past the infighting between the liberal Reddit refugees of World and the, “old Lemmy,”" communists of ml, users seem to tie their identity very heavily towards their instance. I’m worried that in the long term, that will drive people away from committing to cross-instance communities; even now, I hear people brag about how they’ve blocked entire instances because they’re full of, “centrists,” or, “tankies.” I think the downside of federation is that it leads to tribalism, and enough of it could kill the momentum Lemmy needs to grow.

I don’t mean to sound down on Lemmy; it’s the most interesting platform I’ve seen in years, and I’m curious to see how it develops. But at this point, I’ve abandoned Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and MySpace; I’ve learned that social media accounts are not permanent parts of your life. I’m having a lot of fun with Lemmy, but I don’t expect to be using it in 5 years.

I mean, the point of a mermaid isn’t that it’s a sexy looking fish, it’s that other than its tail, it looks like beautiful human women. In some stories, sailors don’t even realize they’re taking to mermaids because their tails are underwater. Also, mermaids were generally considered bad omens or malicious entities, and when they did seduce humans, it was usually to kill them, so it’s not like the folklore was very pro-mermaid sex.

I don’t know where my Dad got them, but they were pretty much all Apogee games, so he might have order them directly. I was really young, 4 or 5, so I didn’t really ask for them. My Dad would just install them for us and create directory shortcuts so we could load them easily. Part of how I learned to type and read was spelling out, “keen4” and either getting the game to load or, “Bad command or file name.”

Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. My Dad had an IBM machine that booted up in DOS, and he installed a bunch of games on it for us. I played every Commander Keen game (including Keen Dreams), Wacky Wheels, Oregon Trail. Sim City, and Sim Ant on that machine (although I think I needed to boot up Windows to run those last two).

I still get emails from my dormant account, and according to my Gmail, the sender is, “X (formerly Twitter),” so I don’t think we’re done with that yet.

More importantly, >!they just gave up on their relationship because one of them was leaving the country? For what, less than a year? After all that, they just threw it all away because they didn’t want to deal with FaceTime for a couple of months? Bet they felt real fucking dumb when the pandemic hit.!<

I mean, fair enough, but I’ve never heard anyone use tankie as…well, not a pejorative. Like, I’ve never heard a liberal call themselves a, “libtard.”

The worst thing for a tankie like me was running here to get away from the insane msn-pilled discourse, finding some actual leftists, only to have have leredditors chase me down sayin’ i am following them.

Uh…tankies and leftists are not the same thing (though the liberals on Political Memes don’t seem to understand the difference). Tankies are authoritarian-apologists. It was coined by British communists who wanted to differentiate themselves from pro-Soviet communists (specifically, communists who were defending the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary). In the modern sense, it’s used to describe communists who defend authoritarian socialist or communist states. If you don’t feel compelled to justify Stalinism, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Uyghur genocide, you’re probably not a tankie.

Since no one has said it yet, original Ghostbusters.

Thank you! Like, this isn’t how foriegn influence campaigns work. Believing the jerk you’re arguing with is a Russian agent might make you feel like you’re in a Tom Clancy novel, but the odds are it’s just a dweeb with multiple accounts. Foriegn influence campaigns make sock-puppets to repeat the same 5 talking points on as many communities as possible, and maybe have a few canned replies. They don’t fight with the same person in a 20 reply thread over the course of 2 days.