Pluralistic: Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification (07 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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“We need policies that keep middlemen weak.”

stood out to me.

Many of my influences have railed against middle men, and I think that’s unfair. I’ve worked with plenty of middle men that made everyone then better off.

I’ve also had the unique displeasure that at least half of all links shared with me in recent years have been to a site called “Instagram”, where I am unable to access the content without an account (which I refuse to make because Zuckerberg is a creepy stalker.)

I find it deeply weird that such a locked ecosystem now controls so much attention.

I find Cory Doctorow’s thoughts on the problem and potential solutions to be both hopeful and cathartic.

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    4•5 days ago

    I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

    • Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
    • Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
    • The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
    • The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

    Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

    • @rottingleafEnglish
      2•5 days ago

      Enshittification is not just erosion\reduction of the role of open projects and non-encumbering licenses.

      All your examples are of successful enshittification. Except since C64 a lot has changed.

      XMPP - you’re right, but wrong. It’s still usable, which is more than what one can say on other examples. But it’s architecturally insecure and half-broken. Some kind of “Signal with federation” would be interesting.

      Android - yes, using it in a good way is more rare than FreeBSD on desktops. And the ecosystem is good only compared to Apple’s.

      The Web - you are as wrong as it gets. It was really open, with standards one can grasp, and with the ability to use any embedded content using all kinds of plugins, usually proprietary, but not always, via Netscape plugin API. Java applets - open enough, but often insecure, Flash videos - that one could play with open plugins usually, Flash games and other applications - usually not, but you wouldn’t have to install Flash if you don’t want that. The security problems could be solvable with sandboxing, maybe with something else. The browser itself had only to support web standards and said NPAPI (if one wanted those plugins). People do come up with all sorts of solutions. Instead of looking for solutions everybody was looking for an excuse to make a web browser itself an overly complex platform. Some consciously, and some thinking that the magic of the Web will grow with its functionality. It was the opposite. It is enshittified because of stuffing everything into the browser instead of modularity.

      C64 and RPi - these are too different to say anything. But RPi being open is not true.

      Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

      My cause for hope is that the humanity will do the right thing after exhausting all other options. Just as usual.