Technology

I remember the "big movement" when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my "bubble" use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don't want to "educate themselves" about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn't even been a thing. It's techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering "mastadon" (oh, you misspelled it?) or "twitter alternative" into a search engine, etc. "pick an instance" is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for "political" or other reasons were hit in the face with "Pick a distro!!!". SUSE has been called "the Windows among the Linux distros" by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: "This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer." It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands.

I knew it wasn't just my imagination. Amazon has been filled with cheap Chinese knock-off brands in recent years, to the point where I may as well be using Temu or Wish for a bargain.

If you went from the internet's storefront to an upmarket AliExpress, that's not a good sign.

Five giant websites featuring screenshots of the other four.

Holy shit.

The solution is to reject any monetization of anything online. Anti advertise. If a content creator has ads take a minute to talk about how the product is the worst. Maybe it started a fire from a friend of a friend basement and killed their whole family. Maybe it made someone you know infertile. If a marketing team acts like a celebrity to promote rampart, you do what we all did in the rampart ama no matter what it is. Reject anyone trying to monetize and capitalize on the internet until all the assholes that running ever other medium leaves.

The telephone jumped the shark a few years ago. Now no one expects using the phone for legit business. Now it's email.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

Corey Doctorow always hits so hard

I'm waiting until someone invents antidisenshittificationism

Great read. Great summation of the last 30+ years.

Longer than I wanted to keep reading, not dissatisfied that I kept reading.