The Great Enshittening
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
Most people had a personal homepage of some type (complete with under construction gifs, naturally).
You'd think that 20 years on it would be trivially easy for someone to create their own place online, but the average person is likely to either start a Wordpress blog of some kind, with plugins, or just use social media. And social media is more or less a walled garden now.
Want to read someone's Twitter. Create an account. Want to view their Facebook page? Create an account. Want to look at their Instagram pics? Create an account. Oh, and if you try to do any of this incognito then expect a LOT of captchas.
`Most people had a personal homepage of some type` Most people absolutely did not have a homepage
Certainly when I consider what the good internet was circa 1995, it was not friendly unless you were technical.
And today, when the geeks have had enough, they launched all these fediverse products. I love this. It reminds me of the old days of the internet. I don't even visit any of the legacy enshittified sites any longer.
But this isn't something the rest of my family will do. For them, it's not a better experience like it is for me.
And when you have places like Kagi doing their small web search, looking for the good old days where people hosted their own sites (like I do), what they are doing is catering to us geeks. Non-geeks have just as much time and inclination to do that work as I have to replace my own roof.
I don't know if there's a solution other than we have our good stuff over here, and they can have that stuff over there.
And besides, technical people are the reason the internet is the way it is. The same people who shat in everyone's punchbowl are now complaining about the taste.
I guess... no problem then...? Non-technical people can just stop using the enshittified Internet today. Why don't they?
> And besides, technical people are the reason the internet is the way it is.
I'm with Doctorow on this one, that greed-driven vendor lock-in is the reason it is like it is.
> The same people who shat in everyone's punchbowl are now complaining about the taste.
I don't know about this--I don't see Google or their peers complaining about the taste at all.
Wordpress doesn't require you to log in. It's just a web page.
Blogs are blogs. There are more of them than ever, far more than you can ever read.
A possibility to consider: they're no longer all made up of people who are capable of running a web server, and therefore not all directly connecting to your own personal technological interests. I suppose there's nothing wrong with missing the days when everybody was a lot like you, but I consider the Internet a lot more interesting for having everybody on it.
Is the suggestion here an organized boycott of enshittified platforms? Support for government anti-monopoly efforts? I think both of those are unlikely to gain enough traction or have much impact, for all of the reasons outlined in the article.
That or everyone retreats to small web alternatives like Gemini[0] which are purposely designed to be anti-growth and anti-capitalist, and gatekeeps the hell out of everything.