Day 2984783 of mentally substituting “enshittification” with “rot”
Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-consumer due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.
Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.
Yes, that’s true, but the word sounds bad so I’m using the more fun one. I suppose we could use a qualifier, like “corporate rot”
I mean, what if “we” just stop using various social media platforms all together? I remember the days when various people never really shared their opinions and beliefs about most topics to the general public. Maybe we should get back to face to face conversations about life topics.
It’s unlikely it’ll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media his capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.
Agreed, I left twitter almost a year ago and haven’t felt the need to sign up for any of its alternatives, federated or not. I just haven’t felt like my life is missing anything by not using these platforms.
I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. He’s been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective that’s effectively unique. I believe him when he talks about this stuff. I get his point of not putting effort into building up a platform that can hold him and his audience hostage.
but here’s the good part.
People bailing on Twitter to join Bluesky is reasonably easy (there are tools available to find your friends on the new system). If it’s easy to bail on Twitter to join Bluesky, it will be similarly easy to bail on Bluesky to join Mastodon, if/when that becomes necessary.
There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.
it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
That’s true from our perspective, but not from someone like Cory’s.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesn’t just have friends and people he follows on these platforms — he has an audience. And closing his Twitter or Facebook or whatever would mean leaving large audiences that he has built up behind.
Cory stays on those platforms as his own version of the (justifiable, but regretful) compromise he writes about companies making. Better to stay on those shitty platforms and continue to reach people than abandon both the shitty platforms and his audiences there.
That’s why he doesn’t want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
Except it’s been 2 years and most people haven’t yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.
It’s not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.
A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users’ lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
Incredibly clear article pointing out that no individuals will ever be able to resist enshittifaction pressures indefinitely.
The only way to prevent people with power from emiserating others is to structurally remove any benefit to doing so.
Last 16 years of my life have taught me (though I had read that stated before, just without such experimental confirmation) that even such obvious mechanisms humans don’t understand.
I mean, if you show the world as consisting of negotiating groups exchanging value in different dimensions, it’s pretty clear.
Power corrupts. No news there.
deleted by creator
All hail NOSTR protocol 🫡
No good clients.
And no clear intended usage scenario. That’s also why IPFS is not very popular.
Meh
It’s even less cost to switch it there’s nothing to switch
That’s why some people just create their own instances.
Yes, but I didn’t, despite running several of my own servers it’s extra time I get little return for
I don’t even know what nostr relays I’m using
It’s very promising, but I find it confusing
Yeah it’s a new frontier but it’s cool
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will
I don’t know who this person is, but that seems a bit pompous.
He is. And his care for the audience translates to posting 10+ post threads to mastodon, a microblogging platform, because he cares so much. Instead of, dare i say, posting one toot with a link to his blog.
I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.
Don’t know which is worse, really. At least some at least unlist from the second post onwards, kinda mitigates.
I don’t think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.
By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don’t want to see long posts, you don’t have to click to expand them.
As always, there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/345/
It’s pretty much the same thing as using services that you can’t self-host and fork. I won’t spend time on any technology that I’m locked into using their app or a login. Is that pompous? I’ve used various services and technology that are proprietary, and invariably it’s bit me in the ass because they have a captive audience.
I will never use a smarthome device that has to have a cloud account or would be bricked without an internet connection, because eventually it will be a brick because the profit incentive says brick it and get the marks to buy another one. That’s the point of that comment.
To clarify, the pompous part relates to “devote my energies to building up an audience”. But maybe it’s because I devote my energies to shitposting instead. On the other points I can get where you’re coming from.
Your probably should if your interested in digital rights. Pretty good author too.
what do you mean?
He’s a c-list celebrity and genre author. I generally agree with what he says and enjoy his writing, but I’d be surprised if any of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
Edit: I am surprised that some of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
I am surprised that some of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
You’re surprised that a privacy and security advocate and essayist with a large online following would have people who would take his advice on which social media platform is best for security and privacy?
Me.
I followed him from Twitter to Mastodon, even though he didn’t exactly endorse Mastodon. If he were to endorse a platform I wouldn’t think twice about joining.
I know people who have, so I would disagree.
Is that was he is claiming though? I read it as spending effort to get people to follow him there, i.e. posting and engaging on the platform to increase his visibility and number of followers there, when he could spend that effort doing it elsewhere / doing something else.
That’s the way I read it as well.
+1
He could have avoided that statement entirely.
