An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore…
You don’t seem to really understand the word enshitification. It’s not just “things getting shittier” - it refers specifically to the capitalist pressures that are exerted on private platforms and services that need to chase investor capital to scale and survive. The reason enshitification happens is because they are operating under a model that needs to first entice users with a high value product that is subsidized by venture capital, but that when that dries up the pressures come first to appease the investors at the expense of the users and then the owners at the expense of the investors. Fediverse for all its croaks and groans in these early stages is specifically designed to be decentralized and scalable by small clusters of users. It’s user owned and managed. When one cluster shows signs of degrading, you can move to another. I’m bullish on fediverse and decentralized platforms like this on being that solution and it’s not clear yet that they suffer the same inevitable enshitification that legacy platforms do.
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