Enshitification doesn’t end. It collapses under its own weight as people get tired and instead stop using things or switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
> switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
Asking because things don’t always magically get better, for example phones are still mostly using locked down Android that bends to corporate whims and the alternative phone options are quite limited (how many Linux phones have failed to get mass market adoption?).
Ofc not all is grim, like Framework is doing some good work on repairable hardware in general and also in regards to software there are quite a few FOSS projects that respect the user etc., like Mastodon also exists and is actually decent to use.
I just think it’s important to acknowledge that the network effects of some of these established players are quite major.
> What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
I know this might not be a popular view but I'd be fairly content with a fediverse that never scales to the size of platforms like reddit, a lot of the reasons I use the fediverse is because it resembles older forums or even reddit before it was enormous.
With every year passed the bar for a successful Linux phone got higher. Potential users expect more & more apps for internet-related services to run while the companies tear down their APIs making more 3rd-party apps impossible.
Facebook Messenger didn't have an XMPP API because Zuck was a nice guy back then.
The fact that you use fediverse and framework as some catchall for future innovation tells me you are really missing my point.
I am talking more about on the level of things like the migration of time spent watching television to time spent on Facebook on a pc to time spent swiping TikTok on an iPhone. None of these are inherently good or bad, but many of them exhausted their ability to grow and attract costumers and as a result doubled down on extracting value from an existing base - that’s what enshitification is or so I thought.
Enshitification doesn’t end. It collapses under its own weight as people get tired and instead stop using things or switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
> switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
Asking because things don’t always magically get better, for example phones are still mostly using locked down Android that bends to corporate whims and the alternative phone options are quite limited (how many Linux phones have failed to get mass market adoption?).
Ofc not all is grim, like Framework is doing some good work on repairable hardware in general and also in regards to software there are quite a few FOSS projects that respect the user etc., like Mastodon also exists and is actually decent to use.
I just think it’s important to acknowledge that the network effects of some of these established players are quite major.
> What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
I know this might not be a popular view but I'd be fairly content with a fediverse that never scales to the size of platforms like reddit, a lot of the reasons I use the fediverse is because it resembles older forums or even reddit before it was enormous.
With every year passed the bar for a successful Linux phone got higher. Potential users expect more & more apps for internet-related services to run while the companies tear down their APIs making more 3rd-party apps impossible.
Facebook Messenger didn't have an XMPP API because Zuck was a nice guy back then.
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The fact that you use fediverse and framework as some catchall for future innovation tells me you are really missing my point.
I am talking more about on the level of things like the migration of time spent watching television to time spent on Facebook on a pc to time spent swiping TikTok on an iPhone. None of these are inherently good or bad, but many of them exhausted their ability to grow and attract costumers and as a result doubled down on extracting value from an existing base - that’s what enshitification is or so I thought.
Seems inherent to capitalism. I think hope here is futile
One can always hope capitalism is replaced by space communism like in Star Trek.