The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. “My job is to make things shitty,” the man explains. “The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.”
The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”
Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents.
Yeah well america is one big business, they don’t care for regular citizens, they wanna know how they can make profit of citizens. I bet that wont ever change
The United States was in early release. We’re thrilled to announce we’ve officially launched and will be landing in a country almost certainly near you.
The problem here is - in my opinion - caused by:
- the need to chase unlimited growth (by definition impossible)
- lacking regulations
- monopolies and such
- price fixing
- weak worker rights
The right always chasing “deregulation”? Well, here is the result. High profits, high prices, shitty products and services.
And the people suffer.
“the commons” has largely been privatized online. That is the result of what you have stated.
We should all be ashamed, and afraid.
Also the mental disease which is known as “wanting to be a billionaire”. Everything in the world is structured around making that status the ultimate goal. It is like endorsing sociopathy.
With Elon Musk soon to be a trillionaire and maybe Zuckerberg and Bezos, too. Being a billionaire won’t be the dream goal anymore.
i dream of being out of debt
And every time you try to undo at least some deregulation, you get likened to Stalin, no matter how bad that deregulation was.
As they say. The cloud is someone else’s computer.
Emphasis on someone else
Irrelevant. They can do it to devices you physically own.
Only if it is linked to an online service or update service. In the absence of that they need to hard bake their enshitification strategy upfront.
A few days ago I tried to find the best frame of the video to turn into a meme. This is what I came up with.
This is a handy meme to have these days. I hope to see it in circulation and to spread it myself! Thanks!
Funny, just today I found out my subscription to addy.io, the email alias company, was somehow deactivated, and I reactivated it today. Unfortunately, any emails or email metadata sent to deactivated aliases are not kept on their servers, which is fantastic for privacy, but then I start thinking, “what if these were important emails I couldn’t get because my subscription was fucked with?”, or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can’t get any emails I was expecting?”. Now I’m at a crossroads as to whether or not I should continue primarily using my aliases for my emails, or just provide my true email for important services and leave potential spam/junk to the aliases.
Sidenote, the reason I wanted to use my aliases as my primary email contact was because of breaches I discovered via Have I Been Pwned. I think I did go a bit too far in the opposite direction, so now I need to find that middle ground. Definitely gonna make some changes over the next few days with my email addresses on my accounts.
or "what happens if the email alias service goes down and I can’t get any emails I was expecting?”
mail servers are generally supposed to try for a few days when delivery fails
Exactly why I only use email aliases for newsletters and stuff
I have one primary email and one that goes to a «not important» folder that I check irregularly.
Seems a good middleground, don’t have to create a new alias for each service
Hmm maybe i’ll do something similar. I was thinking recently of using a new alias when doing purchases online but haven’t decided yet. Kinda don’t want to over-complicate things you know?
Works for me. Mail there gets auto «read» too so I don’t have notifications or indicators of new mail :p
You can use a custom domain in many cases, which you control (not sure about addy.io though). Still has the dependency on the service, but you can at least quickly transfer if it goes to shit.
For me important stuff gets the real email address and the secondary/beyond gets the aliases
Not sure I agree with the statement that we wouldnt accept enshittification in our analog lives… ovens and refrigerators with screens and becoming unrepairable, cars are only sold with onboard computers and power windows with no other price point, materials for most household items becoming plastic / single use / or deliberately designed with a failure lifetime. I recently started buying clothing with no synthetics and they are unfathomably better performing in terms of breathing, odor, comfort and warmth. We’ve forgotten what physical products used to be like, in 20 years we will have similarly forgotten what un-enshittified internet / tech was like.
I think, and perhaps it’s scarier than anyone wants to admit, we’ve already gotten accustomed to or given up fighting against enshittification of the analog world.
The common thread is capital and financialization, and there can be never be progress until the ideas in “how to win friends and influence people” are called out as demonic and unhuman.
The fact that half of eligble voters in the US willingly voted for the ultimate enshittifier not once, but twice, is a testament to this.
I’ve also started buying natural fibers only. Noticable improvements in quality of life
Absolutely - enshittification isn’t just an internet phenomenon, but literally everything has been getting worse because oligarchs are squeezing more money out of us.
I think the point was if it was a person physically doing it to you, you wouldn’t just sit there watching them do it.
I agree with everything you said, but why you gotta do power windows dirty like that 😭
I don’t think they were shitting on power windows, but rather the lack of option for a lower priced model without them. It wasn’t too long ago that there were economy models without power windows available for certain cars.
For me it’s a tale about loss of ownership in a dematerialised world. No one is going to cut a piece of my dining table because I own it and physically have it entirely at my side.
I’ll never own (my locally installed) Spotify nor the songs I listen to. Though for the later I have vinyl alternatives which no one is touching.
In his Enshittification book, Cory referred to this as “technofeudalism” —essentially the return to the feudal society where there are owner elites and peasant subjects. The owners control everything, and the peasant have to rent access under the terms and conditions set by the owners. In the technofeudalism model, everybody (the peasants) have to subscribe to access anything from the corporations (the owner elites), with the corporations retaining all the power.
If you want a specific variety of a plant that’s patented by, say, Monsanto, you don’t own the seeds you get but rather their permission to plant them.
If you re-plant seeds in your own field produced by the crops of the previous year on that same field they can sue you and they will win (see Bowman v. Monsanto Co.)
This is why I only seed torrents
They’ll also sue your neighbour if your plants spread seeds to their land.
That’s cool. Good thing I have a black light, and can modify the seeds the same way they do. Therefore, not the same seeds.
Edit: didn’t make this clear enough, the idea is to lightly modify their seeds just enough to make it legal. If they want to be shitty, we can be shitty right back. Any rule they make for us they make exceptions for the rich. Therefore, with enough cleverness and a stubborn refusal to accept others bullshit(and a bit of spite) you can exploit their rules and bend them to your will.
Or they can just unfairly fuck you over even though it’s hypocritical and illegal and makes no sense
I mean yeah, that’s fair. That’s why I take the initiative and illegally fuck over any big company I can. Obviously can’t give any examples, but I believe the top rated sub outside of porn on Reddit back in the day was a good starting place. You like boats?
I have no experience agriculture patents, but couldn’t Monsanto make it illegal for someone to modify “their product” without their explicit permission?
I left it in the sun too long, oops. Well, now that this is no longer one of your seeds as it contains distinct genetic differences which differentiate it from the genes listed in your patents, I guess there’s no issue with me running experiments on it?
Enshittification is the product of high-barriers to entry in markets, especially monopolies.
As it so happens, the entirety of Intellectual Property legislation purposefully and artificially creates monopolies where they would naturally never exist and give said monopolies to specific people, supposedly the creators of intellectual works and inventions, but in practice it’s to companies.
So, unsurprisingly, it’s in the domains were Intellectual Property dominates - were monopolies are not just common but actually the norm - that the most enshittification happens.
So yeah, Patents, anything to do with Music or Video distribution, Software and because of things like anti-circunvention legislation (which is supposed to block unautorized copy of copyrighted materials) in general any form of digital content since for-profit companies invariably place digital content under some form of access control exactly because they can use anti-circumvention legislation to block their customers from moving to better products and services without incurring significant inconvenience.
IMHO, tearing down Intellectual Property legislation (or at least have it include forced interoperability as well as make consumer data be owned by the actual consumers with company-bankrupting fines for abuse) would reverse most enshittification, at least in the digital world (were anti-circumvention legislation is especially bad in terms of destroying even the smallest element of a Free Market).
Bit worse than that isn’t it?
Indeed. IP / patents is clearly a source of issue in physical objects as well. But once you buy them seeds they stay « according to the initial specs ». They won’t suddenly grow another plant once you have them.
You might not be allowed to do anything you want but that’s another annex issue.
You can have digital no problem. I have 25 year old mp3s. It just needs to be physically on your drives. You can pirate or purchase music today without issues. Spotify just scratched that laziness itch at one point in time and now you are locked in.
For anyone who is interested in returning to simple mp3 players, check out the Snowsky range by Fiio.
The Echo Mini and soon to be released Echo Nano are pretty great little pieces that inhabit the offline music (and not your phone) space.
Edit - and Bandcamp or Soulseek to fill the drives up :)
I have some cowon player around here but cannot find it anymore. That old thing supports 128gb via SD card.
What I would like is something modern, small player with a clip and Bluetooth for the buds.
Running could be so awesome but here we are running around with heavy phones. I guess some people use watches like that.
can’t beat physical media
Yeah but I’m not putting my turn table in my back pack to go fishing with ;-)
There’s always the in between “ipod-era” setup, which is what I’m trying to transition back to: ripping and collecting media locally, then listening to it on my phone without streaming.
Ha yeah the times of my creatives « something ». It was so easy to manage. Less convenient than Spotify but that was super nice. Though it’s bound that there a plex equivalent for audio that I could look into. Family sharing is one of the functions I would miss going back to the dedicated player.
I use Jellyfin for simplicity, which probably isn’t the most preferred service for music, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re accessing it from your choice of mobile app anyway. You can set it up to stream your music library to your phone anywhere if you want also. (Android Auto even has an app)
I’m not confident enough to open up my media server to the outside world yet because I’m still a noob at this stuff, so I just have my full library when I’m at home and anything I’ve downloaded to my phone while I’m out.
You can even set up family sharing - you just give them a login, and they have access to all the same music.
This is why I love plex. Plexamp makes it so worth it.
On the open to the outside world I bypassed the issue by only allowing vpn into the local network and the particular subnet allowed to vpn users is itself limited to specific resources on our internal network. Removes a lot of headaches but in general I don’t go for the hassle to setup the vpn accounts for rando / acquaintances.
I looked into jellyfin but my first attempt was not the success I hoped it would be hence why I use plex for videos.
Smart idea to use such a solution for audio but it likely comes with limited playlists features and no lyrics ?
Playlists are easy enough so far. It just depends on what app you use to access it, I think. I don’t know if there’s a limit. I’ve never looked into lyrics, but I would assume it doesn’t offer that unless it’s pulled with the metadata or something.
Here’s the video, it’s funny cause it’s infuriatingly true.
Genius
The problem is capitalism. Specifically, the consolidation of power in a small number of decision makers.
Break up the big companies. Stop letting them do mergers and acquisitions. You don’t even have to do something radical like dismantling capitalism entirely.
I wish I knew how!
Dismantle the establishment board by board
I guess we just keep voting Democrat until something happens…
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom.
How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Companies used to have a smaller reach, meaning less total and potential customers. So they had to balance what what was good for the shareholders qith what was good for the customers or risk losing both. But products are often global now, especially digital ones. There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose. And investors don’t care as much about the long term since they can trade stocks so quickly. Maybe the solution is required holding periods for stocks or something. Higher short term capital gains taxes, and better incentives for long term gains.As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue.
I’d say its one step worse than that. If you just wanted to return value to shareholders, the 2010s Facebook model of selling a few ads in between pictures of people’s pets and graduation photos would work just fine. They could have churned this for decades unimpeded. And the less they fucked with the model, the more money they’d have made long term.
It isn’t merely shareholder value that these companies crave, but perpetual double-digit growth in valuation. And, to that end, they’re gutting the golden goose for a sudden spike in quarterly profits.
It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg’s company be valued at $100B. They needed to go for that fourth comma. So they started coming up with crazy - apparently impossible - ideas to reinvent themselves into… the Metaverse, where your whole OS is in VR! Diem (formerly Libra), the Killer Stablecoin! Whateverthefuck AI thing they’re doing, to make human labor irrelevant!
Because they’ve bought into a notion of perpetual high speed growth through financialization. They cannot conceive of any kind of economic boundary or closed system. Like a deadly virus that spreads too quickly, they cannot see the edges of their population space or curb their basic impulse to consume.
There seems to always be more customers to replace the ones they lose.
So much of the drive towards AI is an insane quest to create a financial market without human customers. Just a big machine that sucks in investment capital and reports back a higher earnings figure.
It’s increasingly divorced from any kind of material condition. And increasingly predicated on unfettered access to an unlimited pool of natural resources backed by an unchallenged Petrodollar.
So I will disagree on one point. If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price. And if the company isn’t growing double digits, buyers will go elsewhere. So the drive to produce shareholder value forces companies to chase the double digit growth or die. And shareholders want quick gains, so they can move on to the next company with double digit growth.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way. People see that, and then aspire to do the same so they can be rich. This is why ceos spend so much time essentially marketing thier companies ideas. Thats how you get the stock price to go up. Buyers buy on the perception that a company is doing great things, or will. Reality doesn’t often factor in like people think it does.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans. All they care about is a sales pitch that makes the stock price go up. If telling people that there software will replace humans does that, then that is what they will say. They don’t let reality get in the way.
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders.
Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you’re not competing for space on the screen, you’re competing for number of people who see your content. “Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That’ll cost you extra.”
The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.
Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.
It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way.
The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm’s board for this very reason.
Tesla’s board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk’s pet startups.
Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.
As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans.
The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They’re building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.
If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders. Shareholders only make money if the stock price goes up, which requires people to buy it at the higher price.
Government should be the balancing act in response to this. Regulations enforced by Governments.
That is a nice thought. But the government has never been “for” the people. And you can’t reasonably expect people who are chosen by a popularity contest to be able to devise a way to provide that balance. It’s not a required skill to get elected. And you can’t expect the voters to know what real skills a polotician has. The spin and propaganda are just to effective at manipulating voter impressions. So it can’t be the government…
Governments should be more or less thinktanks for the Nations issues. They’re not expected to know all the answers, but collectively, they’re in a position where they have access to the people who do. Ideally, they work together to solve a Nations issues.
What is the alternative if not government?
It won’t stop until stocks are no longer a thing.
Honestly it seems like a bad idea to have stocks in the first place
Like a loan shark you can never get rid of.
Why does this even exist ?
I remember learning about the stock market in grade school and I thought it was stupid then and I think it’s stupid now.
It’s harmful in pretty much every way.
stock are great for the rich who don’t have to lift a finger to pay a broker to put 1 mil into a stock and let it get to 2 mil in a couple years. With zero labor involved.
This is the race to the bottom I mentioned. If one country doesn’t allow stock in their companies to be bought, the companies can’t make as much money. So they don’t form as often or move. Then that country goes into a recession. Overall, it is the lack of a world wide coordinated effort to prevent the incentives to mortgage the future for gains today.
Stocks aren’t necessarily a bad thing since they in theory represent abstract ownership of a thing. Perfectly fine when privately held, it becomes an increasingly problematic thing when. Traded on an open market though.
I think whenever stocks exist, regardless if private or public, the goal of the company becomes focused on increasingly profits instead of sustainability.
Not that non-traded companies don’t want profits too. But the goal of “forever-increases” in profits will ultimately be destructive to a company as it will lead to lower quality, more exploitation, and intense focus on monopolizing their industry as that will be the only way to retain customers.
I think investing in companies is not really a bad thing. But it should be more like a set contract with an end date and/or amount.
More like a loan with interest. From a bank. Or how some contracts are made with movie actors and such.
A percentage of profits over a 10 year period or something.
Idk. There has to be a better way to do this.
The stock market has too much influence on the economy without bringing a benefit that surpasses the damage it does.
The nature of non-traded and private stocks can be debated for days, especially when you get into the minutiae of stuff like mining stocks for example where it can represent the payout to workers, investors, and owners at the end of a season. But what has made itself evident is that the stock market should not be allowed to exist as it is. Maybe it can be devolved back into resource stocks but that’s just getting into your contract loan/payout idea.
As long as companies primary purpose is to make value for the shareholders, this will continue. It is a race to the bottom. How do you fix that without massive upheaval for the people you are trying to help. I don’t know.
Remove shareholders from the equation.
It can change, but it’ll require a large number of people seeing it as a problem worth addressing. Companies currently don’t value customer experience very well and haven’t for a long time, witness how phone customer service has become loaded with automated services standing between users and a small phone support staff. But if that were change, if stockholders were to come to see how much users hate that, and more importantly if users were to base their habits on that decision, it might cause things to improve. Money people, despite their near-legendary density, tend to be very nervous about trends. It might be possible to spook them.
Well, I think it could happen. I’ve been wrong before.
It’s tough, the companies can’t change unless the people do. Meaning customers refusing to do business with companies that have bad customer service or refusing to buy stocks in such companies. But there will always be people who see that they can make money off of other people doing that. And it doesn’t work if some people get rich bucking the trend.
the term enshittification refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere
That’s not exactly what it is, though. Enshittification is the deliberate degradation of a product for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue, where the product is progressively degraded up to the point where the consumer ditches it, but not exactly to it.
Without the tie to maximum revenue and measurement of consumer ability to cope, it’s hard to understand why enshittification is so brutally frustrating.
Cory Doctorow describes the stages of enshittification as follows:
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
And for good measure he reminds us of the why and how things used to be better:
The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc
You know, I agree with him that the pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership, but I don’t think he got the reason for the change right. I think what we call Late Stage Capitalism comes from a single source: corporations don’t give a rat’s ass any longer if they exist in ten years. They are willing to toss reputation and long-term prospects out the window because the only metric that matters is quarterly numbers.
It’s a thing I noticed on the Internet. I wondered why so many sites become big and then shoot themselves in the foot. We are on Lemmy (well, I am on Piefed) now, many of us from enshittified Reddit. But Reddit was the savior from an enshittified Digg, which was the savior from an enshittified Slashdot, etc. It figures that each iteration knew they were going to die making the choice they made, but also knew the quarter would be spectacular.
That worries me, because it’s much easier to destroy something than to build it. If you go and look, the Internet is slowing down. It isn’t being innovated, despite the need to do so. Instead, the big players see something grow, and they use their massive resources to buy it and kill it.
That’s why I love open source: what is being built has long term plans. The main way that open source projects get enshittified is when they close source innovation and then follow the same trajectory as the big companies.
I think you’re being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there’s a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that “everyone” is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there’s a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of “efficient” capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.
Yeah, I do get it. I made fun of my younger brother because he still uses a yahoo.com email address, and then my older brother chimed in from his hotmail account.
Also agree on the dangers of monopolies. It may just have happened that the FTC was unable to crush them before they got too big, a side effect of Internet growth. The processes to control corporations could not cope with the phenomenal growth of Google, Facebook, and lately openAI.
Was there a “pre-enshittifcation era” or were we merely at the first stage of system-wide enshitification?
The late 90’s, early 00’s were pre-. About 2003-05 it started becoming enshittified, ie: ISPs started throttling, a lot of forums were bought out and/or priced out, etc.
Feels very fitting for The Guardian to downplay how the profit motive inherent in capitalism contributes to enshittification, even when Doctorow’s original definition clearly includes it.
Actually, I think that’s the main process of enshittification, but I don’t think enshittification is always deliberate.
Very often software products are tweaked, changed, or even degraded in an attempt to “simplify” or “improve” a particular user experience at the expense of another UX.
And to make matters worse, some companies end up with a Frankenstein product of confusing functions because they are trying to cater to two entirely different user bases within the same product.
E.g. Microsoft may genuinely have believed that changing their system settings UI in Windows 11 to “consolidate and reduce drift” of system configurations would improve the everyday user experience, but they failed to account for the decades of inertia they’d built up from their prior OS user base and how that would piss off a not-insignificant number of other users who had grown accustomed to the way the product had previously worked.
The “for the purpose of extracting maximum revenue” is a bit redundant, though.
Everything a corporation does is for that purpose.
That’s still not it, though. Extracting maximum revenue is just the default state for all things in capitalism, so it is not a qualifier or distinction that is useful to identify enshitification.
Enshitification is a model specifically for platforms. It’s not enshitification if it isn’t a platform; that’s just sparkling greed.
“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,”
Ummm… It’s happening constantly in the “analogue” world.
You’d need to make better humans first. oops
Here are the proposals: https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/2026-02-27-final-letter-to-eu-policymakers-2.pdf
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Rebalance power between service providers and consumers.
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Tackle dependency on Big Tech
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Double down on the enforcement of existing laws.
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Close the existing legal loopholes by adopting a strong Digital Fairness Act.
Nothing concrete. 3, 4 are mainly about enforcing GDPR. 2 is a job for public sector. All this is not really related to enshitification, it’s more about independence from US tech.
That leaves us with 1, which they describe as “It should be possible and practical to switch to alternative service providers, or tweak services they already use to suit their needs and preferences”.
Sounds great but what does it really mean? You can already switch to alternative provides. You don’t have to use Google or Facebook. Are they suggesting I should be able to move my facebook account to some other site? Which one? Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don’t really see how this would work.
Tweak the services? I don’t think trying to fix Big Tech is the right way to go. What tweaks would save Reddit for example? The issue was moderation and bots. What tweaks would fix Instagram?
I think the only alternative to current shitty internet is internet paid for by the users based on common protocols, self-hosting and federation. You want to post things on the internet? Host some open source service or pay someone else to host it for you. Most people will still prefer to pay corporations with their data and watch endless ads instead of paying directly to the service providers but at least there would be an alternative. And as Bit Tech enshittifies more and more people would jump to open source the way we’re seeing with Windows and Linux. For me, what EU should be doing is pouring money into open source project and hosting open source services.
Other than some sort of interoperability between messaging apps I don’t really see how this would work.
IIRC, when telephones were in their infancy, you would only be able to contact people within your network. Imagine only being able to call other T mobile customers.
We did it back then, we can do it now. No more walled gardens.
Interoperability between messengers was already proposed, that’s why I mentioned it. But other than that? Are they proposing TikTok, Instagram and Youtube Shorts to somehow exchange content and let users from one service interact with content from other service? Messages have very similar functionality but other services not necessarily. What kind of interoperability are we talking about?
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More of this plz
