Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) Cory Doctorow
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I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. He's been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective that's 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 here's 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 it's 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.
Yes, because it's 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, it's only a fraction of users.
The functions I use Facebook for are only valid if it's full of the majority of mankind.
Dating, and finding cheap used shit to buy in a parking lot.
That's true for any social network. It's only useful if a lot of people are using it, but a lot of people won't use it until it becomes useful. That's 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.
There's 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 there's already something that's 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 it's not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that's primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
Except it's been 2 years and most people haven't yet migrated away from Twitter to anything.
That's true from our perspective, but not from someone like Cory's.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesn't just have friends and people he follows on these platforms — 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.
That's why he doesn't want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
Even if you aren't Cory, you have to face leaving behind the people who won't switch (which will be most of them).