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 ā and thus worthless ā 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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world
on 19 Nov 11:18
nextcollapse
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 donāt understand.
I mean, if you show the world as consisting of negotiating groups exchanging value in different dimensions, itās pretty clear.
Heās a c-list celebrity and genre author. I generally agree with what he says and enjoy his writing, but Iād 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.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
on 18 Nov 23:01
nextcollapse
I know people who have, so I would disagree.
Bob_Robertson_IX@lemmy.world
on 19 Nov 01:49
nextcollapse
Me.
I followed him from Twitter to Mastodon, even though he didnāt exactly endorse Mastodon. If he were to endorse a platform I wouldnāt think twice about joining.
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.
Bob_Robertson_IX@lemmy.world
on 19 Nov 12:31
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I am surprised that some of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
Youāre 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?
Itās pretty much the same thing as using services that you canāt self-host and fork. I wonāt spend time on any technology that Iām locked into using their app or a login. Is that pompous? Iāve used various services and technology that are proprietary, and invariably itās 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. Thatās 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.
boatswain@infosec.pub
on 19 Nov 07:33
nextcollapse
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 totally get where Cory is coming from on this. Heās been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective thatās 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 hereās 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 itās 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.
Except itās been 2 years and most people havenāt yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org
on 19 Nov 17:39
nextcollapse
Thatās true from our perspective, but not from someone like Coryās.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesnāt just have friends and people he follows on these platforms ā 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.
Thatās why he doesnāt want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Nov 21:34
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Even if you arenāt Cory, you have to face leaving behind the people who wonāt switch (which will be most of them).
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
on 19 Nov 17:49
nextcollapse
Thereās 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 thereās already something thatās 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 itās not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service thatās primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Nov 19:33
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Yes, because itās 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, itās only a fraction of users.
The functions I use Facebook for are only valid if itās full of the majority of mankind.
Dating, and finding cheap used shit to buy in a parking lot.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
on 19 Nov 23:57
collapse
Thatās true for any social network. Itās only useful if a lot of people are using it, but a lot of people wonāt use it until it becomes useful. Thatās the catch-22 that keeps new social networks from getting off the ground.
Facebook is really nothing without people, opinions, think groups, pacs, and assholes all fighting for attention. That is Facebook.
Once you boil it down to that, it kinda makes you wonder why on earth would want to make another one to start with rather than remove the entire concept from existence.
I mean, what if āweā 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.
merrydrunkenness@lemm.ee
on 19 Nov 15:48
nextcollapse
Agreed, I left twitter almost a year ago and havenāt felt the need to sign up for any of its alternatives, federated or not. I just havenāt felt like my life is missing anything by not using these platforms.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
on 19 Nov 17:54
nextcollapse
Itās unlikely itāll 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.
The single example of a possible positive outcome?
I remember when this happened, they made a big deal about it, however it may not have had that much of a positive effect. You know the void left to be filled with someone as bad or worse.
www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/middleeast/ā¦/index.html
Yes, itās unfortunate it didnāt have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(
As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.
We realistically canāt ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I donāt use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.
burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world
on 20 Nov 01:43
nextcollapse
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.
Cory Doctorow actually coined the term, so a decent strategy given how poorly itās used would be to trust its use any time you read him and substitute it every other time
Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time
The concerns are true but if people leave Twitter for Bluesky itās still an improvement because Elon uses the algorithm to boost far-right content and he has your data.
Sticking your neck out always has the risk of having your head lopped off. But if you never stick it out there you donāt see the light
BatmanAoD@lemmy.world
on 20 Nov 03:12
nextcollapse
What is actually missing from AT Proto to be usable in the way Doctorow describes? He writes:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people Iāve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Blueskyās roadmap for as long as Iāve been following it, but they havenāt (yet) delivered it.
But according to the source code repo, federation features are fully available, including independent servers. Thereās even a guide for setting up an independent server: atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
Edit: looks like Iām probably not missing anything, and the protocol is fully capable of what Doctorow wants, it just doesnāt have any other large instances yet: social.coop/@bnewbold/113420983888441504
Edit 2: I found a post that seems much more honest and informative about the actual limitations of AT Proto. In particular:
Relays cannot talk to Relays. If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you donāt like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay.
ā¦how is it Blueskyās responsibility to set up an independent server? If theyāre the ones that set up the server, how can it be independent?
Doctorowās complaint only makes sense as a critique of Bluesky itself if heās talking about the technical aspects of AT Proto. If what he really means is just ānobody has bothered to actually deploy and maintain a fully separate relay instanceā, thatās not a problem with Bluesky, itās an ecosystem issue that he could help by encouraging people to do that work, rather than discouraging them from learning about the platform.
I honestly donāt have much stake in this fight, Iām just frustrated that, as far as I can tell, Doctorow, an intelligent person with a nontrivial following, appears to be spreading misinformation about what is or isnāt possible with Bluesky.
i_understand@mstdn.social
on 20 Nov 12:32
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If there aren't relays, then there is a reason there aren't relays.
If you feel strongly that you're right about this, then perhaps you should invest in standing up a public relay to prove your point.
WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
on 20 Nov 14:47
nextcollapse
It is kind of weird thay it hasnāt been done yet, but in that thread they posted it sounded like itās totally possible at the moment.
BatmanAoD@lemmy.world
on 20 Nov 19:03
nextcollapse
As I mentioned above, I donāt feel strongly about Bluesky winning, I just donāt like misinformation. (I also have other things I care about more that take up what little free time I have for tech stuff already, so Iām not going to undertake something major just to prove a point.) If thereās really a fundamental problem with AT Proto and how it can be used, Doctorowās post should have made that explicit.
I did find a (more recent) post that goes into detail about whatās lacking, and Iāve edited my original post accordingly.
the reason there arent relays is that theyre expensive to run (150$+ a month, if you rent, and the cost seems to scale linearily with the amount of users on the network), i saw a blog about someone who hosted one briefly (whtwnd.com/ā¦/Notes on Running a Full-Network atprā¦, and it isnt even that hard to setup, itās mostly just the cost.
Also, relayās arenāt technically needed, you could make an appview that pulls from pdsās directly.
Iāve read over the documentation a few times and maybe Iāve missed it somewhere else but Iām not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDSās 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.
threaded - newest
All hail NOSTR protocol š«”
Itās even less cost to switch it thereās nothing to switch
Thatās why some people just create their own instances.
Yes, but I didnāt, despite running several of my own servers itās extra time I get little return for
I donāt even know what nostr relays Iām using
Meh
Itās very promising, but I find it confusing
Yeah itās a new frontier but itās cool
No good clients.
And no clear intended usage scenario. Thatās also why IPFS is not very popular.
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.
Power corrupts. No news there.
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 donāt understand.
I mean, if you show the world as consisting of negotiating groups exchanging value in different dimensions, itās pretty clear.
so, socialism?
I don't know who this person is, but that seems a bit pompous.
+1
He could have avoided that statement entirely.
Heās a c-list celebrity and genre author. I generally agree with what he says and enjoy his writing, but Iād 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 know people who have, so I would disagree.
Me.
I followed him from Twitter to Mastodon, even though he didnāt exactly endorse Mastodon. If he were to endorse a platform I wouldnāt think twice about joining.
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.
Thatās the way I read it as well.
Youāre 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?
Your probably should if your interested in digital rights. Pretty good author too.
Itās pretty much the same thing as using services that you canāt self-host and fork. I wonāt spend time on any technology that Iām locked into using their app or a login. Is that pompous? Iāve used various services and technology that are proprietary, and invariably itās 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. Thatās 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.
As always, there is a relevant XKCD: 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.
Iām puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.
Donāt know which is worse, really. At least some at least unlist from the second post onwards, kinda mitigates.
I donāt 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 donāt want to see long posts, you donāt have to click to expand them.
Iād say that collapsing thing depends on the clientā¦
When I say āby defaultā, I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.
what do you mean?
.
I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. Heās been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective thatās 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 hereās 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 itās 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.
Except itās been 2 years and most people havenāt yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.
Thatās true from our perspective, but not from someone like Coryās.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesnāt just have friends and people he follows on these platforms ā 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.
Thatās why he doesnāt want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
Even if you arenāt Cory, you have to face leaving behind the people who wonāt switch (which will be most of them).
Thereās 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 thereās already something thatās fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.
The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and itās not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service thatās primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
Yes, because itās 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, itās only a fraction of users.
The functions I use Facebook for are only valid if itās full of the majority of mankind.
Dating, and finding cheap used shit to buy in a parking lot.
Thatās true for any social network. Itās only useful if a lot of people are using it, but a lot of people wonāt use it until it becomes useful. Thatās the catch-22 that keeps new social networks from getting off the ground.
Facebook is really nothing without people, opinions, think groups, pacs, and assholes all fighting for attention. That is Facebook.
Once you boil it down to that, it kinda makes you wonder why on earth would want to make another one to start with rather than remove the entire concept from existence.
I mean, what if āweā 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.
Agreed, I left twitter almost a year ago and havenāt felt the need to sign up for any of its alternatives, federated or not. I just havenāt felt like my life is missing anything by not using these platforms.
Itās unlikely itāll 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.
The single example of a possible positive outcome? I remember when this happened, they made a big deal about it, however it may not have had that much of a positive effect. You know the void left to be filled with someone as bad or worse. www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/middleeast/ā¦/index.html
Yes, itās unfortunate it didnāt have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(
As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.
We realistically canāt ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I donāt use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.
what days were those? the stone age? because people have been talking remotely for thousands of years.
Humans are social creatures by nature. The goal should be to improve our social interactions instead of letting others exploit them for profit
You canāt put that tube back in the tube of toothpaste
Day 2984783 of mentally substituting āenshittificationā with ārotā
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.
Yes, thatās true, but the word sounds bad so Iām using the more fun one. I suppose we could use a qualifier, like ācorporate rotā
Cory Doctorow actually coined the term, so a decent strategy given how poorly itās used would be to trust its use any time you read him and substitute it every other time
Corporate rot sounds better than just rot as enshittification happens on purpose due to seeking to extract maximum value from something where as rot is just a natural consequence of atrophy over time
The concerns are true but if people leave Twitter for Bluesky itās still an improvement because Elon uses the algorithm to boost far-right content and he has your data.
Sticking your neck out always has the risk of having your head lopped off. But if you never stick it out there you donāt see the light
What is actually missing from AT Proto to be usable in the way Doctorow describes? He writes:
But according to the source code repo, federation features are fully available, including independent servers. Thereās even a guide for setting up an independent server: atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
Edit: looks like Iām probably not missing anything, and the protocol is fully capable of what Doctorow wants, it just doesnāt have any other large instances yet: social.coop/@bnewbold/113420983888441504
Edit 2: I found a post that seems much more honest and informative about the actual limitations of AT Proto. In particular:
Edit 3: the āmore honestā post above actually appears to be misleading as well: bsky.app/profile/shreyanjain.net/ā¦/3lbndy6pknc2k
@BatmanAoD @ProdigalFrog
How many relays are there?
ā¦how is it Blueskyās responsibility to set up an independent server? If theyāre the ones that set up the server, how can it be independent?
Doctorowās complaint only makes sense as a critique of Bluesky itself if heās talking about the technical aspects of AT Proto. If what he really means is just ānobody has bothered to actually deploy and maintain a fully separate relay instanceā, thatās not a problem with Bluesky, itās an ecosystem issue that he could help by encouraging people to do that work, rather than discouraging them from learning about the platform.
I honestly donāt have much stake in this fight, Iām just frustrated that, as far as I can tell, Doctorow, an intelligent person with a nontrivial following, appears to be spreading misinformation about what is or isnāt possible with Bluesky.
@BatmanAoD
If there aren't relays, then there is a reason there aren't relays.
If you feel strongly that you're right about this, then perhaps you should invest in standing up a public relay to prove your point.
It is kind of weird thay it hasnāt been done yet, but in that thread they posted it sounded like itās totally possible at the moment.
As I mentioned above, I donāt feel strongly about Bluesky winning, I just donāt like misinformation. (I also have other things I care about more that take up what little free time I have for tech stuff already, so Iām not going to undertake something major just to prove a point.) If thereās really a fundamental problem with AT Proto and how it can be used, Doctorowās post should have made that explicit.
I did find a (more recent) post that goes into detail about whatās lacking, and Iāve edited my original post accordingly.
the reason there arent relays is that theyre expensive to run (150$+ a month, if you rent, and the cost seems to scale linearily with the amount of users on the network), i saw a blog about someone who hosted one briefly (whtwnd.com/ā¦/Notes on Running a Full-Network atprā¦, and it isnt even that hard to setup, itās mostly just the cost.
Also, relayās arenāt technically needed, you could make an appview that pulls from pdsās directly.
Iāve read over the documentation a few times and maybe Iāve missed it somewhere else but Iām not aware of any option to host a relay yet. As far as I know only self hosting PDSās 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.
Hereās a post on how to set up a relay: whtwnd.com/ā¦/Notes on Running a Full-Network atprā¦
Thank you for sharing, thatās exactly what I was looking for!
If you want people other than nerds in niche communities to care about this, youāre going to have to start calling it something else.
What thing are you referring to?
āenshitificationā
What term would you prefer?
Platform decay isnāt great. Open to suggestions.
Shareholder Blight?
Trump is president elect of the USA and you think the problem to this issueās 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.
Has nothing to do with it being PC or not, it has to do with the term āenshittificationā not explaining jack shit.
Cool. Look at that. Itās the daily Bluesky post. Is it my turn tomorrow?