Embrace, extend, enshittify

I love the "enshittification" moniker that's been going around lately. I feel it nicely encapsulates the nature of what's been happening the last few years in particular. I wonder who coined the term? I don't recall seeing it used until pretty recently. Taking a quick glance, it seems like it might've been this article? https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

I sure do yearn for the days of "Extinguish" though, it seems wondrous compared to what's happening nowadays. At least if they extinguished their platforms, many others would jump in to fill the void left behind, and hopefully do a better job at it. Better yet, the world will ~~objectively~~ arguably be better off! Thanks for taking one for the team, Tumblr.

I feel like the Facebook Messenger XMPP support is a better example -- but it's hard to find any reference to it remaining outside of the internet archive. Even this old HN thread about its death leads to a dead end (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769).

8 years doesn't feel like long enough for this extremely relevant example of Facebook closing support for an open protocol to have vanished.

I think all centralized and practically unavoidable to use services should be run by non profit organizations controlled and subsidized by democratically voted governments. That way they would serve people instead of the other way around. You see the same kind of thing with unavoidable things like infrastructure; people and countries thrive if they take care of it instead of trying to compete or worse, monopolizing it.

Or at least regulate to that end. Perhaps the EU could simply require all large companies like meta to support ActivityPub for services like this.

The only thought I had while reading this post was: "Obviously?"

At this point it feels like the only thing that can stop Meta shittifying the web even more is the EU launching an anti-competitive measure against them.

I doubt Threads can hurt ActivityPub much, it’s either valuable to users or it isn’t. If it is, Meta can’t really kill it, if it isn’t, it’s a nice pressure release valve for people who dislike Meta or prefer custom clients to still interact with their platform and provide content to people on Threads.

tl;dr, Meta is making a play like they have before with Threads, cloning other platforms' features etc, in this case to use ActivityPub and take advantage of the mess Twitter is in with a seemingly large mass of people looking for a new centralized space to converse in.