The lede: No one is the enshittifier of their own story.
I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage — when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile — that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/
But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out.
I’m glad to read this. I’d like to leave Facebook, but I feel trapped the same way Doctorow does. I’d like to leave The Site Formerly Known as Twitter (aka X), but I remain there. OTOH, that’s where the AI action seems densest, and that’s important to me, and I don’t want to spend time working my way into some other site, like Bluesky. Between my blog, Facebook, X, Flickr, Brainstorms (a private, but not exclusive, online community), and Instagram (which I’ve largely abandoned), my monthly column at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve got more than enough media to handle.
Doctorow remarks that, yes, all these sites cared about their users, in the beginning. But: “They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.”
Doctorow goes on to talk about federation:
On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users.
There's much more at the link.
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