Cory Doctorow
Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
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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/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
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Cory Doctorow
It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms.
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Cory Doctorow
But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.
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Cory Doctorow
They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group with you; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.
All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else.
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Cory Doctorow
Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" - a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/
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Cory Doctorow
That's why people stay behind - not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.
Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies.
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Cory Doctorow
These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.
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Cory Doctorow
But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services.
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Cory Doctorow
After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.
When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.
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Cory Doctorow
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital *very* early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
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Cory Doctorow
If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors - both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today - are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.
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Cory Doctorow
What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"
At its root, enshittification is a theory about *constraints*. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part.
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Cory Doctorow
Companies don't pursue *unprofitable* actions at all costs - they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.
When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms.
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Cory Doctorow
That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:
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Cory Doctorow
A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys competitors can treat its users far worse - invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc - without losing business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":
Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation
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Cory Doctorow
If Zuck feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).
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Cory Doctorow
As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.
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Cory Doctorow
But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-part technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified).
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Cory Doctorow
IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
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Cory Doctorow
IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy - the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads.
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Cory Doctorow
Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.
Of course, many Facebook *employees* cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs - 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024.
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Cory Doctorow
Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting - not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:
This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons.
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Cory Doctorow
This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, lets his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without any consequences. Zuck 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.
Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter - the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year.
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Cory Doctorow
Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up - he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service.
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Cory Doctorow
He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an *unconstrained* greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.
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Cory Doctorow
These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.
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Cory Doctorow
That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM Entil Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
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Cory Doctorow
In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification - not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase *profit*. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is *profits*.
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Cory Doctorow
If the fines - or criminal charges - Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.
To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive - it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.
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Cory Doctorow
This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers.
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Cory Doctorow
Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.
Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition.
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Cory Doctorow
These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights - but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.
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Cory Doctorow
I'm saying it's good praxis to understand the divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.
Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto).
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Cory Doctorow
The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.
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Cory Doctorow
That means Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that their VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.
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Cory Doctorow
This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
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Cory Doctorow
Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure - that is, independently standing up an alternative server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba
For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival - why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative?
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Cory Doctorow
Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.
I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse - it's the defeat of enshtitification.
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Cory Doctorow
My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet - and not just the Fediverse - then you should share this goal, too.
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Cory Doctorow
Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.
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Cory Doctorow
The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).
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Cory Doctorow
This is the strength of federated, federatable social media - it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.
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Cory Doctorow
Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.
The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet.
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Cory Doctorow
Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.
SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.
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Cory Doctorow
The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.
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Cory Doctorow
There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.
Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free - but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it.
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Cory Doctorow
Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to *shatter those locks*, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.
Audre Lord is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it.
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Cory Doctorow
You can be sure it'll have all the right driver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.
Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is *amazing*, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.
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Cory Doctorow
But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks - the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
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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 have one more week pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
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Cory Doctorow
@randy Fixed!
Randy Hall
@pluralistic
Cory, in case you haven't already been told elsewhere, typo in today's post, screenshot attached.
"they didn't get to run GM >Entil< Ronald Reagan"
Great job as usual on the post.
Greg Linden
@pluralistic Yes, it's lack of competition that causes enshittification. Companies can only enshittify if their customers have nowhere to go. Solutions are regulators increasing competition, requiring companies to interoperate with alternatives, and making enshittification less profitable (eg. fines for scammy ads). Exactly right, yes.
Rusty Shackleford
@pluralistic This is an excellent point. For those who care about liberating society from oligarchs and their reality distortion machines, the goal of the fediverse can't be to create a neat little safe space for tech nerds. The goal should be to completely replace corporate social media in the mainstream. For that, we need to offer an actual alternative with all the same features people have come to rely on. We need Facebook, but unshittified, decentralized, and free.
Angela Scholder
@pluralistic For the last month I've been announcing on Falbook that I will be cancelling my account before the end of the month.
So, that people should mail me their up to date contact details so we can keep in touch.
Well, just only a very few did so.
The rest will just be a shame, but my ring of people will je be smaller.
Trantion
@AngelaScholder @pluralistic chances are a lot of them don't use Facebook any more either but never thought about it. Those who do will never be shown your message until 3 days after you leave, judging by when it has shown me time-sensitive messages for the last couple of years
Greg Linden
@pluralistic Cory also says enshittification happens a little at a time, getting worse each time they get away with it, doubling down. Bad A/B testing can do that. I'd add that regulating ads is a huge lever to change behavior. Great to see this as Cory's upcoming book will get a lot of attention. This is the first I've seen in the many books on misinformation and disinformation that offers practical solutions (probably too late now for the US, but the EU could do these).
Cory Doctorow
@NerdRelaxo Did you read the rest of the thread? Because there's another 811 words that answer this question in excruciating detail.
NerdRelaxo
@pluralistic Why the effort? There's the Fediverse for god’s sake! A billionaire freee network and will always stay that way. Promote that instead of that stupid project. That would make much more sense!
Cory Doctorow
JWM
@pluralistic Maybe the collective action problem gets easier in small increments. Like intermittent fasting, but for toxic and #enshittified social media platforms.
I'm deleting all Meta platforms for at least a week. And I'm looking forward to the attention span I get back from just focusing on the Fediverse and real life.
Graeme 🏴
@pluralistic Well written, well said. I still suspect that the advertising revenues that support these crappy services are a bit of emperor's new clothes, and there's a internet advertising bubble due for a burst. Anyone who has to stay on these parasitic feeds, please ignore, block and don't click any ad links. Do your best to screw with the funding!
:blobcathug:
Cory Doctorow
@Jain Please unfollow me here and get my essays via some other method (see links at pluralistic.net). This account exists solely for the purpose of posting long threads.
Author in Mourning
@pluralistic UNIX was my college-age intro to all matters computer. Learning an editing & publishing process from the basic operating system built my foundation for *everything*--a foundation that hasn't often failed me since 1984/85-ish. I can't comment on most of the technicalities you're detailing, but I feel personal impact on this one. When I started out, it was proprietary and I'm really glad it didn't stay that way.
:blobcathug:
Display Name
@pluralistic we'll watch the next big protest never happen due to lack of common communication channels. We'll think that a lot of people don't care. That's why dictators and wannabes happily invested in the Twitter black hole purchase. Fragmentation is the goal. What's the next best thing to the assumed benevolent dictator who owns and may sell the place we (a much much larger we) meet and organize?
ludo
Cory Doctorow
@Jain Then please mute or block me, or if you'd prefer I can block you.
However, if you don't want to see any of my posts, I am mystified by why you think I should change my posting style to conform to your preferences? Surely that's a "you" problem.
ludo
The TL, DR is that there are many good reasons people are locked in shitty platforms and we can care about those people and build routes for them to safety.
Yes, it is good to be out and about in the fediverse AND it is good to care about others who are meeting their needs in the best way they can at the moment while we work on evacuating those cesspools and finding ways to get those beautiful babies out of that locked in bathwater
Quincy Peck
@pluralistic @northernlights I saw Alex Winter post about the Free Our Feeds effort and I admit that I was skeptical at first. But I’ve read this entire post and it makes so much more sense to me now. There’s a lot to like about Bluesky and it would be a shame to lose it like we lost Twitter.
Cory Doctorow
@quincypeck @northernlights Thank you!
:blobcathug:
:blobcathug:
SaftyKuma
Dr. King did it without social media and with the media of the time fully against him. So we need to go back and re-learn the lessons from the civil rights movement.
Cory Doctorow
Alexandre Oliva (moving to @lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)
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