No, that’s not what I’m arguing. We’ve gone from slippery slopes to straw men, apparently, much as I hate calling out the play.
I’m not arguing that because they haven’t enshittified they won’t enshittify. I’m arguing that because they haven’t enshittified, they haven’t enshittified and there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will, how or when.
Big difference. You are implying, if not arguing, that there is a slippery slope towards a specific hypothetical scenario, but there’s no indication of it and even in that hypothetical there is no indication that the situation would be any worse than in the alternative you present. It’s just fallacious through and through. I don’t need to argue that they won’t ever enshittify for that to be a bad argument.
And by the way, you keep doing it. You immediately go back to a scenario in which BS defederates from itself and from a protocol they built, designed and presented as a USP in the first place. It remains obviously fallacious. I have no need to argue about a version of reality you made up, or to defend the inexistent version of players or events playing out solely in your head.
That last paragraph is a lot more valuable, though, but it is just restating the point I already addressed earlier. My point is that how many people are using third-party AT providers is entirely irrelevant, just like the number of fedi people not on mastodon.social is entirely irrelevant. The point of having a standing protocol is that people could move in the future. If BS did make very fundamentally bad choices people could conceivably move over then. The benefits of decentralization don’t exist until you have to move instances. There is nothing in your interaction with the service that is better because it is decentralized. In fact, decentralization makes a number of things harder to implement. But the presence of the possibility of defederation or migration fundamentally changes how service and instance owners can act by removing a BIG chunk of their leverage over the userbase’s data, relationships and content.
People here don’t like to hear it, but in that sense AT is actually more robust than AP. Account migration including follows and messages is a major part of that flexibility and it impacts that stickiness more than whatever the current distribution of users happens to be in a scenario where nobody is doing anything particularly shitty.
I would argue that even that flexibility is overstated. Once thing that we learned the hard way when people got weird about federating with Threads is that being decentralized does not mean you’re endlessly resilient and forks or disagreements that split the collective management down the middle can do really bad damage.
While we’re calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you’ve gone from “there’s no indication that will happen” to “there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will”. But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.
I didn’t say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don’t throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.
It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.
By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT’s account portability feature. That’s nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.
Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don’t get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don’t have to, but hey can.
That’s a failure state of the system itself; it can’t properly bring its strengths to bear. And that’s precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.
While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.
No, I have not backpedalled my argument. You can’t claim I said a thing I didn’t say and then accuse me of changing my position for restating my point. I mean, you can, but it’s some bullshit and it’s not gonna fly. That’s why I don’t like calling out these things in public, it really brings the Google out of people.
I claimed there is no indication that it will happen the first time, you claimed that I was saying it would definitely not happen and I restated that no, what I said is there was no indication that it would go one way or the other. So no, there is no indication that it will happen.
You can keep pushing your hypothetical all you want, it won’t get any or more likely. You’ve decided to make up that scenario in reverse, because you have chosen a football team to support and are now imagining ways to justify that selection. The exact same scenario could be played out in reverse. If you’re building a doomsday scenario out of whole cloth you can get as convoluted as you want and say it seems likely to you. I could poke holes on it, and there are plenty to be poked, but that’d require accepting the premise and arguing about the hypothetical instead of reality. That’s why it’s a frequent fallacious argument in the first place. So we’re not doing that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the argument you’re doing mental gymnastics to bypass is still that interoperability and decentralization only actualize when people need to move. The amount of concentration prior to people moving is, and remains, irrelevant, at least in relation to the importance of the feature existing in the first place.
No, that’s not what I’m arguing. We’ve gone from slippery slopes to straw men, apparently, much as I hate calling out the play.
I’m not arguing that because they haven’t enshittified they won’t enshittify. I’m arguing that because they haven’t enshittified, they haven’t enshittified and there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will, how or when.
Big difference. You are implying, if not arguing, that there is a slippery slope towards a specific hypothetical scenario, but there’s no indication of it and even in that hypothetical there is no indication that the situation would be any worse than in the alternative you present. It’s just fallacious through and through. I don’t need to argue that they won’t ever enshittify for that to be a bad argument.
And by the way, you keep doing it. You immediately go back to a scenario in which BS defederates from itself and from a protocol they built, designed and presented as a USP in the first place. It remains obviously fallacious. I have no need to argue about a version of reality you made up, or to defend the inexistent version of players or events playing out solely in your head.
That last paragraph is a lot more valuable, though, but it is just restating the point I already addressed earlier. My point is that how many people are using third-party AT providers is entirely irrelevant, just like the number of fedi people not on mastodon.social is entirely irrelevant. The point of having a standing protocol is that people could move in the future. If BS did make very fundamentally bad choices people could conceivably move over then. The benefits of decentralization don’t exist until you have to move instances. There is nothing in your interaction with the service that is better because it is decentralized. In fact, decentralization makes a number of things harder to implement. But the presence of the possibility of defederation or migration fundamentally changes how service and instance owners can act by removing a BIG chunk of their leverage over the userbase’s data, relationships and content.
People here don’t like to hear it, but in that sense AT is actually more robust than AP. Account migration including follows and messages is a major part of that flexibility and it impacts that stickiness more than whatever the current distribution of users happens to be in a scenario where nobody is doing anything particularly shitty.
I would argue that even that flexibility is overstated. Once thing that we learned the hard way when people got weird about federating with Threads is that being decentralized does not mean you’re endlessly resilient and forks or disagreements that split the collective management down the middle can do really bad damage.
While we’re calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you’ve gone from “there’s no indication that will happen” to “there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will”. But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.
I didn’t say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don’t throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.
It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.
By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT’s account portability feature. That’s nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.
Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don’t get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don’t have to, but hey can.
That’s a failure state of the system itself; it can’t properly bring its strengths to bear. And that’s precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.
While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.
No, I have not backpedalled my argument. You can’t claim I said a thing I didn’t say and then accuse me of changing my position for restating my point. I mean, you can, but it’s some bullshit and it’s not gonna fly. That’s why I don’t like calling out these things in public, it really brings the Google out of people.
I claimed there is no indication that it will happen the first time, you claimed that I was saying it would definitely not happen and I restated that no, what I said is there was no indication that it would go one way or the other. So no, there is no indication that it will happen.
You can keep pushing your hypothetical all you want, it won’t get any or more likely. You’ve decided to make up that scenario in reverse, because you have chosen a football team to support and are now imagining ways to justify that selection. The exact same scenario could be played out in reverse. If you’re building a doomsday scenario out of whole cloth you can get as convoluted as you want and say it seems likely to you. I could poke holes on it, and there are plenty to be poked, but that’d require accepting the premise and arguing about the hypothetical instead of reality. That’s why it’s a frequent fallacious argument in the first place. So we’re not doing that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the argument you’re doing mental gymnastics to bypass is still that interoperability and decentralization only actualize when people need to move. The amount of concentration prior to people moving is, and remains, irrelevant, at least in relation to the importance of the feature existing in the first place.