Can Twitter Alternatives Escape the Enshittification Trap?

holo_nexus@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 84 points –
Can Twitter Alternatives Escape the Enshittification Trap?
wired.com

People have flocked to Bluesky and Threads. But the new platforms risk repeating a pattern that has caused social media giants to turn against their own users.

17

Why are people talking about useless social networks and not the ones that actually matter?

Lets talk Github people. Can Github escape the enshittification trap? Because not even Sourceforge escaped enshittification... and Github is now owned by Microsoft.

So far GitHub under MS seems better than before. But I still plan to move all my projects to GitLab, because I don't trust them. But it's gonna be hard.

Some parts are better. Github actions is still a dumpster fire.

My god it is; I had to jump through so many hoops to get it to do what I want..

Going with no, Github won't escape it because "enshittification" is just "monetization" to all of the corporations making those decisions.

Tbh the git app or protocol makes it so easy to get up and relocate.. and programmers in general are probably some of the most capable users of relocating that even if it were to happen many of them wouldn't care that much. It's a good portfolio site and decent for collaboration of many projects. Doesn't currently get in the way and provides good or better visibility for projects than gitlab or bitbucket. Till the visibility issue is resolved better by a competitor that offers something significantly better or github makes disastrous decisions then people will be happy at github. Regardless I don't think there would be much drama around moving homes if that day ever comes.

Agreed. Also social connections isn't the primary goal. In fact doing anything related to that would be weird in Github

Bluesky and Threads are perfect examples of "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I've got no sympathy for folks who will be blindsided when those platforms start squeezing them almost immediately.

There really needs to be a better examples and instructions to join mastodon / fediverse. I can see the confusion. Maybe just a default server specified by the primary developer

I feel like those were somewhat easy to find (but not explicitly stated).

  • Lemmy.world for Lemmy
  • Kbin.social for Kbin
  • Mastodon.social for Mastodon

Once people are in there then we start talking up moving to and instance that fits their style. Kind of like picking a fighter character then picking a specialization at level 2. That's still a hard sell on Lemmy and Kbin where we don't have the account export/import/redirect tools that Mastodon has. I could see them coming pretty soon though.

That's a good point. I didn't have any issues but I have heard of others and the article mentioned it

I agree completely. We really need to make onboarding to the fediverse as painless as possible. If there's a barrier to entry the general audience will gravitate towards tech savvy folks. That's cool and all but what made Twitter and Reddit so good was the diversity of voices.

There were tech folks but also senior citizens, people who don't usually use social networks and those with marginalized voices. Both platforms started with mostly tech folks, Twitter didn't really blow up until the color revolutions, reddit really came into its own after the digg exodus.

The fediverse is making big gains because of both platforms thoroughly shitting the bed but we're not the only game in town. Threads has an extremely low barrier to entry but it's an entry into a Max Headroom style blipvert hellscape. Making our barrier to entry as low as possible could really help us "rescue" those users.

I agree that would be nice to make it so easy. I miss my gardening folks