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Cory Doctorow Asks: Can Interoperability End 'Enshittification' and Fix Social Media?

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "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 revolt...

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... 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. 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... 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?"

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