this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024

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Enshittification

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What is enshittification?

The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source

The lifecycle of Big Internet

We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.

Embrace, extend and extinguish

We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.

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Bluesky is working on a subscription. (www.theverge.com)

submitted 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/enshittification

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Well that didn't take long. Looks like they're going the discord route and locking uploads + basic customization behind a subscription. You know, because we don't already have enough of those.

Bluesky is working on a premium subscription that will add features like higher-quality video uploads and some profile customization options.

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[–] LordKitsuna 13 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Because it's the only way the service can continue to exist. I don't understand where people think the money to run these things come from. It's either advertising or subscriptions. Bandwidth is not free, storage is not free the idea that you can host a service that lets literally anyone just constantly upload a continuous stream of whatever fucking dumb garbage is in their head for the day without ever asking for any kind of monetary value is the thoughts of the mentally incompetent.

It sounds like most of the features are still going to be free they're just going to offer higher quality and some other perks if you pay so that they can actually keep running the damn service

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Of course they are, them doing so was never in doubt. They're running on Venture Capital and sooner or later the investors want their money back. Bluesky has to figure out how to do that and transition their users into to before they run out of money.

[–] Shardikprime 5 points 3 hours ago

And then people complain about paying subscriptions and not having enough to live on. My god people, no one needs to pay for this. This shit didn't even exist 2 months ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Well, that didn't take long..

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 hours ago

I think this was known to be the gameplan beforehand for Bluesky so this isn't a trick, bait and switch or anything like that. I think it can be reasonable to support the network and infrastructure with subscriptions. However, there are no guarantees as to what the subscription would provide or that the rates will not increase randomly without warning. So long as BlueSky users know that.

A Donation-based model might net less, but it will be centered around what people can pay.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I would not even call it enshittification, this actually seems like a good trade off. How else they would make money? Ads? If they run ads that would be instant no from me

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

People somehow think this stuff costs nothing I guess. The era of everything free on the internet has really made people blind to the fact this all costs money, one way or another.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 58 minutes ago

It’s degradation of service, no new benefits, and it will only get worse over time. This is textbook lock in and enshittify.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 hours ago

I expected that and vastly prefer that over ads. I also support my home server in the fediverse, and I encourage people to provide monetary support to their homeservers and most used servers.

[–] donuts 47 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

If they want to keep existing they are going to need to make money somehow. Cosmetics and power user features without any ads would be the most favorable, right?

It's that or donations, I guess. But with the people running it, I don't think they'd crowdfund a lot of money.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

If only there was an already existing federated microblog that somehow figured this out a decade ago! Maybe BlueSky and ATP would work better if, you know, it wasn't entirely centralized as it currently is.

[–] donuts 16 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Definitely. The fact that it's centralized will eventually lead to ads anyway. That's why they can't throw millions at something like Mastodon or Lemmy, because then they can't control it when it's mass adopted.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I feel you can support a few thousand users as a hobby. Hundred of thousands, rapidly trending towards millions? Get the fuck out of here. I’d question your motives quite a bit harder if you were running a social media site at a loss and seemed to have no true desire to change that.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Mastodon supports over 10 million accounts because ActivityPub is actually decentralized instead of BlueSky/ATP's "I have the concept of plan."

[–] the_toast_is_gone 8 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Mastodon itself gets about $21,000 per month through Patreon alone, and Mastodon.world gets about $900 per month. They're not running the services for free. Also, there are currently just under 1 million active users - a far cry from the 10 million you quoted.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

If they were a true decentralized platform they wouldn't need to worry as much about monetization, but that never really was what they cared about. It's another centralized corpo dom daddy that you suckers will fall for time and time again.

[–] the_toast_is_gone 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

One would think that, if they wanted to be a "centralized corp dom daddy," they wouldn't have added federation to the software. It's not like there's a massive market for federated social media in particular that rivals that of Big Tech platforms. Most people have no idea what federation even means, and they don't care.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

We have yet to see any decentralization of Bluesky, and I doubt we will.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

They get quite a bit of money from donations. At least, .world and .social used to when I checked last year. I don’t see bluesky getting the benefit of charity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

How to kill your growing userbase in one easy step.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, could have been hell of a lot worse.
What are they supposed to do without ads? Locking things behind a paywall that nobody really needs (hello discord) sounds pretty reasonable.

[–] grue 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

What are they supposed to do without ads?

Decentralize/federate like they claimed they were planning to do?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

And hows that gonna help them again?

we see how Decentralization made lemmy and mastodon so much more popular than bluesky.
the only thing that did was make actually start using it so much more annoying and confusing to do than it should be.

[–] paraphrand 2 points 4 hours ago

It’s not that confusing.

[–] grue 2 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

And hows that gonna help them again?

By vastly reducing infrastructure costs, so that they don't have to resort to advertising/enshittification for funding. I thought it was pretty clear from context.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

You're just going to get angry "disagreement" downvotes. They're all in the honeymoon phase. We'll have the "I told you so" phase soon enough.

[–] egrets 1 points 3 hours ago

Those costs don't go away by being spread out. Decentralized or not, hosting costs money. Many fediverse hosts are scraping by or out of pocket, and they're spending their free time on maintenance and administration. We'd be hugely ungrateful to them by pretending that's not the case.

I'm not making an argument for big centralized social media, or I wouldn't be here -- but I'm a "premium subscriber" to my Lemmy instance.

[–] seaQueue 8 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

[–] seaQueue 6 points 8 hours ago

This situation should surprise no one. Bluesky has exactly the same business model problems old Twatter had. Expecting any other outcome than enshitification or acquisition for propaganda purposes is insanity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

Nope

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago