Cory Doctorow
Of course you should do everything you can to prevent fires - and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff *burns*. That includes social media sites.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
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Cory Doctorow
Social media has its own special form of lock-in: we use social media sites to connect with friends, family members, community members, audiences, comrades, customers...people we love, depend on, and care for. Gathering people together is a profoundly powerful activity, because once people are in one place, they can *do things*: plan demonstrations, raise funds, organize outings, start movements.
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Cory Doctorow
Social media that attracts people then attract *more* people - the more people there are on a service, the more reasons there are to join that service, and once you join the service, you become a reason for other people to join.
Economists call this the "network effect." Services that increase in value as more people use them are said to enjoy "network effects." But network effects are a trap, because services that grow by connecting people get harder and harder to escape.
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Cory Doctorow
That's thanks to something called the "collective action problem." You experience the collective action problems all the time, whenever you try and get your friends together to do something. I mean, you love your friends but god*damn* are they a pain in the ass: whether it's deciding what board game to play, what movie to see, or where to go for a drink afterwards, hell is truly other people.
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Cory Doctorow
Specifically, people that you love but who stubbornly insist on not agreeing to do what *you* want to do.
You join a social media site because of network effects. You stay because of the collective action problem. And if you leave anyway, you will experience "switching costs." Switching costs are all the things you give up when you leave one product or service and join another. If you leave a social media service, you lose contact with all the people you rely on there.
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Cory Doctorow
Social media bosses know all this. They play a game where they try to enshittify things *right up to* the point where the costs they're imposing on you (with ads, boosted content, undermoderation, overmoderation, AI slop, etc) is just a *little* less than the switching costs you'd have to bear if you left. That's the revenue maximization strategy of social media: make things shittier for you to make things better for the company, but not so shitty that you go.
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Cory Doctorow
The more you love and need the people on the site, the harder it is for you to leave, and the shittier the service can make things for you.
How *cursed* is that?
But digital technology has an answer. Because computers are so marvelously, miraculously flexible, we can create emergency exits between services so when they turn into raging dumpster fires, you can hit the crash-bar and escape to a better service.
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Cory Doctorow
For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public - not just college kids with .edu addresses - they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.
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Cory Doctorow
To resolve this hostage situation, Facebook gave prospective Myspace users a bot that would take their Myspace login and password and impersonate them on Myspace, scraping all the messages their stay-behind friends had posted for them. These would show up in your Facebook inbox, and when you replied to them, the bot would log back into Myspace as you and autopilot those messages into your outbox, so they'd be delivered to your friends there.
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Cory Doctorow
No switching costs, in other words: you could use Facebook and *still* talk to your Myspace friends, without using Myspace. Without switching costs, there was no collective action problem, because you didn't all have to leave at once. You could trickle from Myspace to Facebook in ones and twos, and stay connected to each other.
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Cory Doctorow
Of course, that trickle quickly became a flood. Network effects are a double-edged sword: if you're only stuck to a service because of the people there, then if those people go, there's no reason for you to stick around. The anthropologist danah boyd was able to watch this from the inside, watching Myspace's back-end as whole groups departed en masse:
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Cory Doctorow
> When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html
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Cory Doctorow
Social media bosses *hate* the idea of fire exits. For social media enshittifiers, the dumpster fire is a feature, not a bug. If users can escape the minute you turn up the heat, how will you cook them alive?
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Cory Doctorow
Facebook nonconsensually hacked fire exits into Myspace and freed all of Rupert Murdoch's hostages. Fire exits represents a huge opportunity for competitors - or at least they did, until the motley collection of rules we call "IP" was cultivated into a thicket that made doing unto Facebook as Facebook did unto Myspace became a felony:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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Cory Doctorow
When Elon Musk set fire to Twitter, people bolted for the exits. The safe harbor they sought out at first was Mastodon, and a wide variety of third party friend-finder services popped up to help Twitter refugees reassemble their networks on Mastodon. All departing Twitter users had to do was put their Mastodon usernames in their bios.
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Cory Doctorow
The friend-finder services would use the Twitter API to pull the bios of everyone you followed and then automatically follow their Mastodon handles for you. For a couple weeks there, I re-ran a friend-finder service every couple days, discovering dozens and sometimes hundreds of friends in the Fediverse.
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Cory Doctorow
Then, Elon Musk shut down the API - bricking up the fire exit. For a time there, Musk even suspended the accounts of Twitter users who mentioned the existence of their Mastodon handles on the platform - the "free speech absolutist" banned millions of his hostages from shouting "fire exit" in a burning theater:
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Cory Doctorow
Mastodon is a nonprofit, federated service built on a open standards. Anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the servers all talk to each other. This is like email - you can use your Gmail account to communicate with friends who have Outlook accounts.
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Cory Doctorow
But when you change email servers, you have to manually email everyone in your contact list to get them to switch over, while Mastodon has an automatic forwarding service that switches everyone you follow, and everyone who follows you, onto a new server. This is more like cellular number-porting, where you can switch from Verizon to T-Mobile and keep your phone number, so your friends don't have to care about which network your phone is on, they just call you and reach you.
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Cory Doctorow
This federation with automatic portability is the fire exit of all fire exits. It means that when your server turns into a dumpster fire, you can quit it and go somewhere else and lose *none* of your social connections - just a couple clicks gets you set up on a server run by someone you trust more or like better than the boss on your old server.
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Cory Doctorow
And just as with real-world fire exits, you can use this fire exit in non-emergency ways, too - like maybe you just want to hang out on a server that runs faster, or whose users you like more, or that has a cooler name. Click-click-click, and you're in the new place. Change your mind? No problem - click-click-click, and you're back where you started.
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Cory Doctorow
This doesn't just protect you from dumpster fires, it's also a flame-retardant, reducing the likelihood of conflagration. A server admin who is going through some kind of enraging event (whomst amongst us etc etc) knows that if they do something stupid and gross to their users, the users can bolt for the exits. That knowledge increases the volume on the quiet voice of sober second thought that keeps us from flying off the handle.
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Cory Doctorow
And if the admin doesn't listen to that voice? No problem: the fire exit works as an *exit* - not just as a admin-pacifying measure.
Any public facility should be built with fire exits. Long before fire exits were a legal duty, they were still a widely recognized good idea, and lots of people installed them voluntarily. But after horrorshows like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, fire exits became a legal obligation.
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Cory Doctorow
Today, the EU's Digital Markets Act imposes a requirement on large platforms to stand up interoperable APIs so that users can quit their services and go to a rival without losing contact with the people they leave behind - it's the world's first fire exit regulation for online platforms.
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Cory Doctorow
It won't be the last. Existing data protection laws like California's CCPA, which give users a right to demand copies of their data, arguably impose a duty on Mastodon server hosts to give users the data-files they need to hop from one server to the next. This doesn't just apply to the giant companies that are captured by the EU's DMA (which calls them "very large online platforms," or "VLOPS" - hands-down my favorite weird EU bureaucratic coinage of all time).
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Cory Doctorow
CCPA would capture pretty much any server hosted in California and possibly and server with Californian users.
Which is OK! It's fine to tell small coffee-shops and offices with three desks that they need a fire exit, provided that installing that fire exit doesn't cost so much to install and maintain that it makes it impossible to run a small business or nonprofit or hobby.
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Cory Doctorow
A duty to hand over your users' data files isn't a crushing compliance burden - after all, the facility for exporting that file comes built into Mastodon, so all a Mastodon server owner has to do to comply is *not turn that facility off*.
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Cory Doctorow
What's more, if there's a dispute about whether a Mastodon server operator has provided a user with the file, we can resolve it by simply asking the server operator to send another copy of the file, or, in extreme cases, to provide a regulator with the file so that *they* can hand it to the user.
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Cory Doctorow
This is a *great* fire exit design. Fire exits aren't a substitute for making buildings less flammable, but they're a necessity, no matter how diligent the building's owner is about fire suppression. People are right to be pissed off about platform content moderation *and* content moderation at scale is effectively impossible:
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Cory Doctorow
The pain of bad content moderation is not evenly distributed. Typically, the people who get it worst are disfavored minorities with little social power and cadres of organized bad actors who engage in coordinated harassment campaigns. Ironically, these people *also* rely more on one another for support (because they are disfavored, disadvantaged, and targeted) than the median user, which means they pay higher switching costs when they leave a platform and lose one another.
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Cory Doctorow
That means that the people who suffer the worst from content moderation failures are also the people whom a platform can afford to fail most egregiously without losing their business.
It's the "Fiddler on the Roof" problem: sure, the villagers of Anatevka get six kinds of shit kicked out of them by cossacks every 15 minutes, but if they leave the shtetl, they'll lose everything they have. Their wealth isn't material.
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Cory Doctorow
Anatekvans are peasants with little more than the clothes on their back and a storehouse of banging musical numbers. The wealth of Anatevka is social, it's one another. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is *leaving* Anatevka, because the collective action problem dictates that once you leave Anatevka, you lose everyone you love:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/
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Cory Doctorow
Twitter's exodus remains a trickle, albeit one punctuated by the occasional surge when Musk does something particularly odious and the costs of staying come into sharp relief, pushing users to depart. These days, most of these departures are for Bluesky, not Mastodon.
Bluesky, like Mastodon, was conceived of as a federated social service with easy portability between servers that would let users hop from one server to another.
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Cory Doctorow
The Bluesky codebase and architecture frames out a really ambitious fire-suppression program, with composable, stackable moderation tools and group follow/block lists that make it harder for dumpster fires to break out. I love this stuff: it's innovative in the good sense of "something that makes life better for technology users" (as opposed to the colloquial meaning of "innovative," which is "something that torments locked-in users to make shareholders richer).
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Cory Doctorow
But as I said when I opened this essay, "you should do everything you can to prevent fires - and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff *burns*."
Bluesky's managers claim they've framed in everything they need to install the fire exits that would let you leave Bluesky and go to a rival server without losing the people you follow and the people who follow you. They've got personal data servers that let you move all your *posts*.
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Cory Doctorow
They've got stable, user-controlled identifiers that could maintain connections across federated servers.
But, despite all this, there's no actual fire exits for Bluesky. No Bluesky user has severed all connections with the Bluesky business entity, renounced its terms of service and abandoned their accounts on Bluesky-managed servers without losing their personal connections to the people they left behind.
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Cory Doctorow
Those live, ongoing connections to *people* - not your old posts or your identifiers - impose the highest switching costs for any social media service. Myspace users who were reluctant to leave for the superior lands of Facebook (where, Mark Zuckerberg assured them, they would *never* face *any* surveillance - no, really!) were stuck on Rupert Murdoch's sinking ship by their love of one another, not by their old Myspace posts.
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Cory Doctorow
Giving users who left Myspace the power to continue talking to the users who stayed was what broke the floodgates, leading to the "unraveling" that boyd observed.
Bluesky management has evinced an admirable and (I believe) sincere devotion to their users' wellbeing, and they've amply demonstrated that commitment with capital expenditures on content moderators and tools to allow users to control their own content moderation. They've invested heavily in fire suppression.
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Cory Doctorow
But there's still no fire exits on Bluesky. The exits are on the blueprints, they're roughed into the walls, but no one's installed them. Bluesky users' only defense against a dumpster fire is the ongoing goodwill and wisdom of Bluesky management.
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Cory Doctorow
That's not enough. As I wrote earlier, every social media service where I'm *currently* locked in by my social connections was founded by someone I knew personally, respected, and liked and respected (and often still like and respect):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
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Cory Doctorow
I would love to use Bluesky, not least because I'm approaching the point where the costs of using Twitter exceed the benefits. I'm pretty sure an account on Bluesky would substitute for the residual value that keeps me glued to Twitter. But the fact that Twitter is *such* a dumpster fire is *why* I'm not going to join Bluesky until they install those fire exits. I've learned my lesson: you should never, ever, *ever* join another service unless they've got working fire exits.
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Boris Barbour
^ Some good news from the EU:
Boris Barbour
LOL
jenkinse
Its definitely much better then Facebook and Twitter but to have the "fire exit of all fire exits" it should at least have nomadic identity built in, there is still room for improvement, you shouldn't need your server to authorize your migration
zetabeta
@pluralistic
it is good time to remind that meta inc owns whatsapp, instagram and facebook. this switching cost applies to whatsapp as well.
something similar to youtube, which is owned by alphabet inc. alternate video sites are not so known but one is peertube, https://joinpeertube.org/ .
jwz
@zetabeta @pluralistic I honestly do not understand what problem PeerTube is trying to solve. "PeerTube is a tool that you install on a web server. It allows you to create a video hosting website." That's called... a web site. With an MP4 file on it. I already had that.
zetabeta
@jwz @pluralistic
if you have video files on your website, good for you. it is a some kind of alternate for youtube.
basically is youtube's and alphabet inc's data collection and other policies. youtube has become hostile to small creators. and arbitrary policies and enforcement make things more annoying. ads also starting to be invasive and too much.
jwz
@zetabeta @pluralistic "YouTube sucks" is not an answer to the question "why is PeerTube useful".
Since step 1 of using PeerTube is "first have a website that is already capable of hosting video" I still don't know the answer to that.
There are many reasons that YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are popular, but the gating reasons on which all other reasons depend are: trivial signup, and "free" hosting.
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