Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off o...
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Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up - he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service.
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He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an *unconstrained* greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.
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These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.
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That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM Entil Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
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In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification - not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase *profit*. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is *profits*.
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If the fines - or criminal charges - Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.
To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive - it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.
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This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers.
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Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.
Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition.
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These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights - but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.
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I'm saying it's good praxis to understand the divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.
Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto).
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The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.
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That means Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that their VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.
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This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:
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Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure - that is, independently standing up an alternative server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:
For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival - why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative?
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R [email protected] shared this topic
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@pluralistic There's an exceptional example of this kind of hard-to-organize collective actions going on today, Jan 20th: many Spanish entities and persons are closing their Twitter accounts today and are coming in a coordinate manner to Mastodon. They're using #juntas / #juntes / #xuntas to introduce themselves and are coordinated around @vamonosjuntas. So far, it seems like a great success. More info: https://www.vamonosjuntas.org
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