Made it because reversal should still be possible, and although there’s [email protected], other than its “positive monday” rule, the deshittification aspect isn’t covered by their rules/guidelines (nothing against their community, though).
Well the thing about enshitification is that it was always basically inevitable. These platforms only cared so much about UX early on because they wanted growth and didn’t mind being unprofitable in the short term in order to grow and dominate the market. Now that they have, they care about monetizing that growth. I don’t think deshitification of a platform is likely. The owners have no incentive to, unless they lose enough users. Inertia, and network effects makes that really hard.
Deshitification through new platforms meanwhile? Possible. I can honestly say people on the fediverse are so much nicer than Reddit, and the platforms themselves have so much more variaty, better customization and UX options. Plus they’re open source (which reddit initially was). The problem is the inactivity, and the overwhelmingness of US-politics and negativity.
I specifically only ever look at Subscribed, never Hot or All or Local specifically to dodge all the US politics. As an American. This works well for me, but I admit just jumping on almost any instance and seeing what is there before you get to log in and filter to only Subscribed is very disheartening. Always some outraging and depressing US politics content on the front page, even without algorithms intentionally trying to push outrage (because unfortunately, outrage naturally succeeds on its own anyways—being angry generates more urge to type 5 paragraphs).
The other commenter’s explanation works well too. But if I have to deal with all these horrid political happenings in real life, I don’t want to come online and see more of it and dwell on it. And having all those politics so popular online… for some it might be informative but I think for most it’s just a venting space and I’m not sure if it’s helpful (getting rid of bad feelings and expressing your feelings is important, a third party could look on and see peoples’ points and get their mind changed) or letting people blow off anger in a way that neutralizes most of their energy to help others or resist bad things more tangibly (volunteering for soup kitchens, calling up their representatives, protesting, local organizing, paying the switching cost and putting in the time needed to move away from infuriating enshittified platforms and learn or self-host a new one), while pushing potential users away because they think the Fediverse is all US politics all the time with no escape.
Grateful you are trying to make a community that is more likely to hold solutions and people trying to solve outraging problems, than people posting about how another bad and outraging thing happened to the tune of 300 upvotes and 30 comments about how angry they are. Pleased to see an Mbin-hosted community, too. More software diversity on the Fediverse is nice.
I was more interpreting the community name as deshittifying your own personal experience with different technologies that are FOSS or at the very least open source. Would be a good place to post when companies are forced to (or even choose) to do something that is significantly more consumer friendly.
I made the community pretty open-ended, so I guess both count.
Also, on using alternatives being a type of deshittification, I’d say even that with competition around, the original or more prevalent tool needs to seek ways to be better as to not lose market share.
Edit: added a third question to the description, so I think it should be clearer
the original or more prevalent tool needs to seek ways to be better as to not lose market share
I think concentration of market share itself is an issue. I just got banned from WhatsApp, twice in a row, by the automated spam banhammer they have, and I fully expect to get banned a third time as soon as their registration retry timeout expires in like 18 fucking hours (I’ve been at this since Friday).
I hate Meta as much as anyone else around here, but I’ve essentially been cut off from my entire community with this single event (which, to clarify, is a completely unwarranted ban that has been reverted by WhatsApp twice now). Everyone uses WhatsApp for their hustles, businesses, friend groups, neighborhood groups, etc. I have tried for YEARS to get a movement going to at least consider installing alternatives. I’m now left with signal which has 1 contact, and telegram which a ton of people downloaded during a whatsapp outage during the pandemic, but which nobody uses anymore because… WhatsApp came back rather quickly.
The lack of interop and lack of any usage of email on WhatsApp for anything other than support tickets, means I might need to ditch my phone number, which I’ve had for 20 years, because Meta’s AI got trigger happy with me for some obscure reason that not even they seem to understand.
Something that truly pisses me off about this specific conversation is, people in the privacy circles can’t quite seem to grasp just how much of a stranglehold Meta has on its communities. There’s 0 chance of me being able to get even a fraction of the people I interact with to use something other than WhatsApp. I’ve tried multiple times through the years and I have never been able to do anything about it, and it quite frankly pisses me off that the general response to someone using WhatsApp around here is “just stop using it and get your friends to stop too lol wtf why you such a lil bitch” as if we don’t live in a society that depends on these fucking monopolies because that’s how they were designed. You quite literally can’t opt for alternatives or go against the flow on this because it can result in you being cut off from your entire community, and as much as anyone here likes to LARP that they’re post-apocalyptic survivors who can and do live by themselves or whatever, that’s not the world we live in.
Some stuff needs to become interoperable, their concentrated market share usage needs to directly correlate to how much regulatory oversight they receive, and ideally it should either be diversified or government-owned if the concentration is too high and can’t be reversed. All of this can only happen through legislation, and clearly legislation isn’t doing shit because the EU’s DMA should have me connecting into the WhatsApp network from other apps already.
If you take a broader view of enshittification (than Doctorows’ original formulation, good as it is), as has been happening to the word, you can apply deshittification to things like right to repair, inter-operability, repeal of reverse engineering felonization, even straight up open source. I actually think it could be a useful umbrella term.
I subscribed to the new community this thread is about; but then again, your comment does kinda make me think that there are already communities like [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected] which should cover a lot of the topics that may be discussed there. Let’s see whether anything unique ends up actually talked about there. :P
The problem is the inactivity, and the overwhelmingness of US-politics and negativity
US politics is overwhelming because of the military right controlled by a deranged pedo and his merry band of halfwit thugs.
I mean, just by comparison, the most terrible thing happening outside America is perhaps in Ukraine and Gaza; but no Ukranians or Gazans believe their current flight is the best thing for them, where 1/3+ of voting Americans actually believe they’re on the best track and prosperity is somehow right around the corner. And guns.
American news is popular for the same schadenfreude reasons that keeps indolent reality TV ‘stars’ in business …except with the added threat of invasion everywhere for the motherland.
Thanks for creating this community.
Looking forward to what it will bring,
but assume/hope it will be some very welcome positive things! :D
