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.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.devOPEnglish
    0·
    6 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.