This whole hubbub about bluesky going public is a little strange, given how utterly predictable and downright inevitable it was. It also got me thinking about enshittification.
This phenomenon doesn't have a formal definition to begin with but the gist of it for me is: The longer a privately owned platform, product, or service is around, the worse it will get, how fast it gets bad, or what decisions lead there vary, but, like with any product under capitalism, there will always be a push towards extracting maximum value for the least possible investment. That's just how infinite growth works (or rather, doesn't).
In relation to social media, this means platforms will roughly do this in several predictable ways:
- In-platform advertisements
- Growing the userbase
- Paid content or features
- Data collection and activity tracking
- User retention via algorithmic recommendations and boosting high value user visibility (celebrities, public figures, etc)
So far Bluesky has opened its doors to everyone (growing the userbase) and am reasonably confident all of the above will come in some shape or form eventually, hell, it already does the latter two, just less aggressively than twitter (for now).
As long as the internet economy continues to work as it does, that place will never, ever get better, it can only get worse.
It might be a hot take, but even without the catastrophic damage Elon did to twitter, it would have eventually ended up where it did, just slower, it was not a good place before he came along and he just fucked it up much faster.
What's the solution? Hard to say, places like cohost are much more resistant to this phenomenon but are still vulnerable to exponentially growing operating costs, and not for profit websites are becoming more rare. As an artist, I need somewhere like bluesky to have any reach and visibility at all, even if I know my experience with the website can only go downhill.
Perhaps, as internet denizens, we are destined to keep on the move, finding spaces we can settle down in and tolerate for a while before packing it up and doing it all over again somewhere else. Maybe something better will come along one day, but for now all we can really do is put our eggs in as many baskets as we can, and supporting each other through it all.