Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) Cory Doctorow

so, socialism?

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.

It's unlikely it'll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.

Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit

You can’t put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste

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.

what days were those? the stone age? because people have been talking remotely for thousands of years.

Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user 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.

@BatmanAoD @ProdigalFrog

How many relays are there?

I’ve read over the documentation a few times and maybe I’ve missed it somewhere else but I’m not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDS’s are an option now (which only handle your own data and authentication but still relies on a relay to serve you content from the rest of the network) and app views (which are the front ends that sort and show content)

So in a sense bluesky is distributed and portable within the ATProto network, but still centralized until other entities can host relays and interopt (or opt out of interoperability) within the network.

Yes, because it's so easy to get people to switch to a different service!

I tried to get my friends to move from Facebook to Diaspora. How many of them did? ZERO. Not even the ones who like to talk about how much they hate Facebook.

Look what it took to peel off users from Twitter! The last straw had to be Elon getting a dictator elected. And even then, it's only a fraction of users.

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.

Except it's been 2 years and most people haven't yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.

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.

Meh

It's even less cost to switch it there's nothing to switch

No good clients.

And no clear intended usage scenario. That's also why IPFS is not very popular.

It's very promising, but I find it confusing

What thing are you referring to?

Trump is president elect of the USA and you think the problem to this issue's path to visibility is political correctness?

Call it fuckification if it gets clicks and attention, this is the USA. They vote for trash, speak their language.

Your probably should if your interested in digital rights. Pretty good author too.

As always, there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/345/

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.

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.

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.

+1

He could have avoided that statement entirely.