Bluesky and Enshittification

I agree with Cory that all platforms eventually seem to become miserable to use, with new ones appearing with big promises that eventually are broken. I'd definitely like to see a large platform not break those promises, but I haven't seen one yet. Those that attempt to stay true to their standards seem to trade their end-of-life misery for a general miserable everyday user experience — at least, in my experience with Mastodon.

There's something contradictory, in my opinion, to Cory's statements that he's made about the diminishing quality of platforms as they age: one, that a platform will close you in and make it difficult to leave; and two, that the platforms that usurp the existing contenders make it easy to onboard. Cory states that leaving Twitter to rebuild a community is a difficult process, but the rapid growth of Bluesky and the easily discovered testimonies of users there finding their follower count balloon overnight seem to debunk that standpoint. Bluesky in particular has methods available to it that help grow follow counts for both users and creators that improve upon both Mastodon and Twitter experiences, but one can only discover this if one avoids taking an immediately adversarial standpoint to the platform.

Things constantly change: people move, change phone numbers, switch email addresses, get new jobs. All of these things can break connections in more dramatic ways than changing from one social network to the next. I'm with Cory on the frustrating aspect of most tech businesses folding to investor pressure, but I'm not convinced that the way to solve this is by removing yourself from that process completely.

Cory seems to advocate trading a closed-source walled garden with millions of users for an open garden with fewer users. If the goal of finding a social network is its technology, then Mastodon might be a better choice; however, if one is seeking a community — that being, a social network with a lot of active users on it — then Mastodon is a dubious choice. Considering Cory complains that building a community from scratch by switching social networks is a difficult task, then I believe that he's going to find it noticeably harder to manage on a smaller platform.

Relevant technical discussion on decentralization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178543

> I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will

Dude is on Twitter, Tumblr and Medium.