I’m really happy for Eugen’s success, and am grateful for his essential contribution to widespread adoption of the ActivityPub protocol, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things.
I think it was honest for him to acknowledge Google’s role in sidelining the XMPP protocol, and while I don’t want to quibble about the other mitigating factors, I do take issue with him comparing the trajectory of ActivityPub with SMTP with the visible adoption and mutually assured destruction of major corporations in maintaining email’s nominal interoperability.
If people haven’t read it yet, they should check out (already Fedi-famous for his article on Enshittification) Cory Doctorow’s article Dead Letters – about how it is impossible for even a well-known public figure with access to the best server infrastructure and technical know-how to run a small private email server hosting completely legal content serving nothing resembling spam in the age of Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft Outlook. There are several ways that federating with Meta can kill this movement, and ActivityPub becoming the new email is one of them.
Basically, if we allow Meta, BlueSky, and Twitter to federate, the very network effects Eugen mentions make it more valuable for them to federate with each other than any smaller server. Predictably they will underfund moderation staff who make errors or their faulty algorithms automatically de-federate smaller servers due to false-flagging spam. Small operators will have to work harder and harder until it is basically impossible for them to overcome the error or fix the problem and re-federate. Eventually small groups that aren’t directly sponsored by one of the giants will be weeded out, as their users migrate to more reliable services. Even if the disconnections and undelivered messages are not the fault of the sysops, they will be scapegoated, and eventually more and more will throw up their hands and leave the rigged game.
While having a protocol you championed become the defacto web standard may feel like a great accomplishment, the Fediverse will never be a “Social Web” until the tools we use to communicate are incapable of being taken from us by corporations. Eugen’s vision of a social media ecosystem where any small developer can write a platform and have access to the entire ActivityPub network is at odds with his enthusiasm for the emailification of ActivityPub.
There are social obstacles to building the “Social Web” and as good as the Activity Pub protocol is, the true technical solution is Solidarity.
I’m really happy for Eugen’s success, and am grateful for his essential contribution to widespread adoption of the ActivityPub protocol, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things.
I think it was honest for him to acknowledge Google’s role in sidelining the XMPP protocol, and while I don’t want to quibble about the other mitigating factors, I do take issue with him comparing the trajectory of ActivityPub with SMTP with the visible adoption and mutually assured destruction of major corporations in maintaining email’s nominal interoperability.
If people haven’t read it yet, they should check out (already Fedi-famous for his article on Enshittification) Cory Doctorow’s article Dead Letters – about how it is impossible for even a well-known public figure with access to the best server infrastructure and technical know-how to run a small private email server hosting completely legal content serving nothing resembling spam in the age of Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft Outlook. There are several ways that federating with Meta can kill this movement, and ActivityPub becoming the new email is one of them.
Basically, if we allow Meta, BlueSky, and Twitter to federate, the very network effects Eugen mentions make it more valuable for them to federate with each other than any smaller server. Predictably they will underfund moderation staff who make errors or their faulty algorithms automatically de-federate smaller servers due to false-flagging spam. Small operators will have to work harder and harder until it is basically impossible for them to overcome the error or fix the problem and re-federate. Eventually small groups that aren’t directly sponsored by one of the giants will be weeded out, as their users migrate to more reliable services. Even if the disconnections and undelivered messages are not the fault of the sysops, they will be scapegoated, and eventually more and more will throw up their hands and leave the rigged game.
While having a protocol you championed become the defacto web standard may feel like a great accomplishment, the Fediverse will never be a “Social Web” until the tools we use to communicate are incapable of being taken from us by corporations. Eugen’s vision of a social media ecosystem where any small developer can write a platform and have access to the entire ActivityPub network is at odds with his enthusiasm for the emailification of ActivityPub.
There are social obstacles to building the “Social Web” and as good as the Activity Pub protocol is, the true technical solution is Solidarity.
At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what....
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
Not really the right use I think. It was coined specifically to describe platforms’ lifecycle of changing who they benefit. What’s above is just constant churn in the attempt of infinite growth or just hanging onto market share trying to decide what people want (or tell them what they should want).
A paid subscription service like O365 or spotify isn’t too similar to the advertising “business partners” of a social media platform like tiktok. Of course language is descriptive rather than prescriptive but I feel like overusing this term loses the perceptive observation (and the message Doctorow wants to promote) of how these businesses work. Microsoft adding new features and spotify changing things to either make their app management easier (they claimed that’s why they got rid of android widget for a while) or promote their own stuff doesn’t seem to fit.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
From pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
If anything, if you prefer signal to WhatsApp (I do), you should be happy with its enshittification - because that means it’s killing itself. But it’s not, and it’s already shit, and its users are okay with that.
adding paid promotions to something that never had them is always the beginning
They’re not paid
They’re not promotions
It’s opt-in
It’s basically a way to keep up with events you’re already interested in (your favourite band, local soccer club, etc). You’re complaining about an optional feature you don’t want to use, that doesn’t even exist yet, and misrepresent it as ads.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
It could be kind of lame to poke fun at a site that I don’t use (anymore), but I find this funny enough to share: Goodreads has started changing and updating their site last year, but apparently they’ve broken a ton of things in the process, and now they’ve published an announcement with the list of 12 bugs they’re...
Based on my limited understanding after reading one article and listening to one talk show on public radio, the issue seems to be that the “tech giants” are displaying full (or nearly full) articles from news outlets without providing revenue to the content creator or links to the original article. If all news outlets disallowed full article replication through copywrite or other legal means, this whole thing would be over, but that’s hard to organize, so they ask the government to help.
To say that the tech giants are providing advertisements isn’t a fair representstill. They’re providing the whole product. The process of how we got here is outlined in Cory Doctrow’s “enshittification” essay. (I’d copy and paste the whole essay here just for irony’s sake, but I’m feeling lazy.
I’m not quite sure how to feel about this whole thing, especially when you consider that public libraries are doing the same thing.
Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline....
Depending on his share of the company (which may change after going public), he might be forced to resign. However, I don’t think that would reverse the process as he apparently surrounded himself with like-minded people (similarly, Neal Mohan continued Susan Wojcicki’s work as well)and the movement towards profitability at all costs and https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys is natural course of action for the company following its bottom line.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
I’ve seen this guy’s stuff floating around on the Fediverse recently—first the enshittification article and now this. Seems pretty interesting, thank you for sharing!
The piece argues that many tech companies and media businesses have turned against their users in an attempt to extract more value. Executives like David Zaslav are criticized for their cynical approach that aims to drain the culture’s “dream reserve” for profit. This enshittification process happens when platforms abuse...
TL;DR: it’s just that the current state of the Fediverse is more attractive for that demographic than for most other people.
NTL;R: It’s a damn complex subject but I’ll try to simplify it.
Let’s pretend for a moment that each user is a perfectly rational agent (they aren’t, but it’s a useful model). A perfectly rational agent will stay in the platform that offers him the most subjective value. And subjective value is tied to a bazillion of factors, among them:
lots of content that the user wants to see, and it’s easy to sort it out from things that he doesn’t care about.
lots of people whom he’d like to interact with, and it’s easy to avoid people whom he’d rather would not.
liking the interface and experience of the platform itself.
the feeling that the platform is reliable, and won’t suddenly stop working.
agreement with the premises, goals, and values of the platform; etc.
Note that the weight of each of those factors changes from user to user, even among perfectly rational agents. For example, Alice might think “I’m fine with a shitty interface” (low weight for #3), while Bob might think “I can’t stand an ugly platform” (high weight for #3).
Now, let’s think about the differences between the Fediverse and “corporate media” in those points. For the first four factors, corporate media is clearly at an advantage, due to: network effect, network effect (again), age of the platform, and more money to throw at their user experience. For the fifth one, the Fediverse is at a big advantage, but only for users who care about open source and transparency.
And who cares about those things? Older, tech-savvier users, who are likely to also use Linux. For those, factor #5 weights so much that it compensates the cons of factors #1 to #4. But for the others, factor #5 is non-existent (they do benefit from the open nature of the Fediverse, but they don’t weight it because they don’t care about it).
That applies to the current state however. The Fediverse is growing, while Twitter and Reddit are enshittifying themselves; so over time there’ll be less of a gap on the first four factors, promoting further migration to the Fediverse, even among people outside the demographic that OP narrowed down.
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
France Is Headed Towards Its Most Feral Right-Wing Regime Since the Nazis (www.thedailybeast.com)
The State of the Federation, with Mastodon's Eugen Rochko (flipboard.video)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/5068112...
The State of the Federation, with Mastodon's Eugen Rochko (flipboard.video)
Highlights include:...
Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem?
At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what....
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee... (www.pandasecurity.com)
The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
Spotify re-invented the radio (lemmy.world)
Can’t even seek through songs.
Reddit is removing ability to opt out of ad personalization based on your activity on the platform (techcrunch.com)
And now Bezos is trying to insert ads everywhere (lemmy.world)
The enshittification marches on – use Signal [WhatsApp] (about.fb.com)
Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone....
It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore (www.businessinsider.com)
Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product? (lemmy.one)
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”....
12 reasons to stop using Goodreads - selected by Goodreads staff (help.goodreads.com)
It could be kind of lame to poke fun at a site that I don’t use (anymore), but I find this funny enough to share: Goodreads has started changing and updating their site last year, but apparently they’ve broken a ton of things in the process, and now they’ve published an announcement with the list of 12 bugs they’re...
YouTube recomending shorts above videos to premium
(it’s a family subscription, not my decision)
Meta to end news access in Canada over publisher payment law (The Guardian) (archive.is)
Move comes in response to Canadian legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers...
Now that the dust has settled, what went wrong with saving 3rd party apps? (i.ibb.co)
Is lemmy growth coming to a halt?
Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline....
Over just a few months, ChatGPT went from correctly answering a simple math problem 98% of the time to just 2%, study finds (finance.yahoo.com)
The Coming War on General Computation [2011] (en.wikisource.org)
Transcription of a talk given by Cory Doctrow in 2011
Here's How Reddit F**ks Advertisers
There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see....
[enshittification process] They Don't Want Us And We Don't Need Them | Defector (defector.com)
The piece argues that many tech companies and media businesses have turned against their users in an attempt to extract more value. Executives like David Zaslav are criticized for their cynical approach that aims to drain the culture’s “dream reserve” for profit. This enshittification process happens when platforms abuse...
Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?
The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:...
Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?