Poo emoji

I missed this when he published it last year, but this strongly-worded and reasoned stuff from Cory Doctorow still applies. He explains why he’ll only ever be found on actually federated social networks. The word he coined, enshittification, can only applied to a captive user base. It makes me think about what I’m doing on Bluesky — which I’ve already described a ‘pound shop Mastodon’.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

[…]

Being a moral actor lies not merely in making the right choice in the moment, but in anticipating the times when you may choose poorly in future, and taking steps to head that off.

[…]

That’s where Ulysses Pacts come in. […] We make little Ulysses Pacts all the time. If you go on a diet and throw away your Oreos, that’s a Ulysses Pact. You’re not betting that you’ll be strong enough to resist their siren song when your body is craving easily available calories; rather, you are being humble enough to recognize your own weakness, and strong enough to take a step to protect yourself from it.

[…]

I have learned my lesson. I have no plans to ever again put effort or energy into establishing myself on an unfederated service. From now on, I will put more weight on how easy it is to leave a service than on what I get from staying. A bad service that you can easily switch away from is incentivized to improve, and if the incentive fails, you can leave.

Source: Pluralistic