Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels *seriously* pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
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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/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba
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Cory Doctorow
It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN.
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Cory Doctorow
The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 *per file*) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he *changed majors* and stopped studying Computer Science.
No, really.
What's more, *none* of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists.
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Cory Doctorow
The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."
One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we *didn't* agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright - say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.
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Cory Doctorow
Another group wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely *enjoying* popular music makes you part of the problem.
You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was *bad tactics*.
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Cory Doctorow
Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "*If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular*."
We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately *fantastic* and makes peoples' lives better.
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Cory Doctorow
Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.
Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens.
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Cory Doctorow
The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.
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Cory Doctorow
Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on - it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users.
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Cory Doctorow
So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?
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Cory Doctorow
There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is *federated*, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/
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Cory Doctorow
There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:
https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook
That's how the Fediverse - which Mastodon is part of - works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server.
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Cory Doctorow
That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies
We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand.
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Cory Doctorow
Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward - even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.
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Cory Doctorow
Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed *so* badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice - it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance.
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Cory Doctorow
That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply
There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:
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Cory Doctorow
I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
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Cory Doctorow
Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled millions of users from other systems, and by all accounts, they've having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users).
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Cory Doctorow
Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party - there's no fire exits!"
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Cory Doctorow
This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.
We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.
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Cory Doctorow
Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:
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Cory Doctorow
Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.
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Cory Doctorow
That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:
It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/
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Cory Doctorow
And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:
https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/
Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial
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Cory Doctorow
When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project
The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs.
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Cory Doctorow
It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech *and* free as in beer:
In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one.
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Cory Doctorow
IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.
We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.
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Cory Doctorow
After all, there's no virtue in *software* freedom. The only thing worth caring about is *human* freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.
If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse.
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Cory Doctorow
But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then god*damn* I will party my ass off.
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Cory Doctorow
*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
eof/
bm
Well. The Napster wars anecdote put a lot of my pacing across the floor into perspective. I'd like to wait until there's some proper federation, but I'm also impulsive, and a small-time artist, and feeling the pressure to join ASAP, because artists have been 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 there.
Nick
@pluralistic I've seen a handful of fedizens being like "I can't believe Doctorow would sign on to Free our Feeds!" when my first reaction was "obviously he'd support Free our Feeds."
When you've said your main issue with Bluesky and centralized networks is "no fire exits" it's practically a no-brainer to support building those exits. Expensive, but probably easier then telling everyone to stop having fun wrong (network effects 😡)
The Napster story is also a great perspective on this
Cedric Rossi
@pluralistic this is what we are trying to solve with the https://app.helloquitx.com/en/ project : it’s a web app, developped in collaboration with @HelloQuitteX and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, which aims to help you migrate to Mastodon and/or Bluesky **together with your network**.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.