Turns out, pretending the entire Internet is equal to 5 apps from mega corps (largely fueled by pretend money) wasn't the best long term play.
Who would have thought?
I'm so tired of big tech taking social platforms and trying to make it increasingly profitable every year. It's just ridiculous.
Remember when social media was created as a concept to talk to other people easily? I'm so thankful for Lemmy and Mastodon and hope to see more decentralized social media networks appear in the future where corporate greed does not impact the direction
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It's nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth--that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough base they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to avoid this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren't open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
We need to understand, though, that the Fediverse is going to undergo similar changes and struggles. People aren’t going to want to pay to run servers, forever, and there will be lost servers and ones that suddenly have ads or subscription fees.
Granted, this creates competition and it’ll be better for the end user, but the utopia of Mastodon and KBin is going to be challenged by the crappy, but very real, realities of the world.
I just cancelled my discord nitro(whatever the previous highest tier annual plans) in May because as a paying subscriber, I still get those intrusive ads that pops above your user corner and won't go away. You are only given options to "try it" "maybe later" and no "not interested", also no button to close it.
The ad client probably pay then significant amount of money that it's worth the risk to piss off paying users.
I sent my support ticket and got lead around the hoops and need to send the request to sort of their internal voting board, which at that point I just gave up and cancel my subscription. If I got spammed more I will probably just go back to web interface and use ublock to start blocking elements. And if I can't I probably just gonna say bye. (the campaign was over, there are no newer spams, but they lost my annual sub pretty much forever as I don't think discord is gonna "be better". )
I think it is a combination between interest rate hikes from the free money paradigm that propped up startups and the gig economy and the AI hype train driving the capture of public data (think enclosures 3.0) at the expense of strong communities. This somehow reminds me of when post-dot-com bubble companies like google had to become "profitable" so "don't be evil" went down the drain and they found ways to monetize their users' data.
This phenomenon isn’t new. I used to have a GeoCities account back in the day. Eventually Yahoo! Bought them, and you know what happened with them. Had a Hotmail account too — and you know what happened to that. Had an ICQ and an AIM account too.
The problem now is that these more recent platforms worked to make themselves harder to replace, so when it came time to replace them, there was more resistance.
I'm wondering if a Co-op model would work for some of these alternatives. Then they would be less reliant on a single owner/developer system, there would be additional support for some of the businessy components, and there would be a built-in groups structure for resolution of issues.
I've been watching the formation of a co-op Etsy alternative, and I'm very interested to see how that goes. I think it's fine to complain about corporatization, but I think it's also crucial to build and support other models at the same time.