Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

@Dinkysaurus Also, a lot of folks have never gone through earlier iterations of having this happen. There are folks who have never experienced forums, or LiveJournal, or earlier places like Usenet groups, and have yet to experience a service dying up to now.

Some of us kind of take this for granted now, but folks who haven't yet will cling to the dying ship until they turn off the servers, like a bunch of us did with AIM, ICQ, and MSN.

It's scary af, but folks will find each other again.

@Dinkysaurus A bunch of folks have stated part of why, but there's kind of a bonus reason: Mastodon was starting to gain traction with one large and popular furry instance, then it fell apart overnight, and that burned a lot of people originally keen to being on the service.

Had that not happened, I think the story here would be different. And it might still be. But it made other options, even terrible ones, more attractive to earlier folks because they stay available. Then it snowballs.

Anyway, that all is exceptionally terse, but this is also why I'm kind of an optimist here.

The worst impulses by people in power (bigger than tech bro billionaires) are likely to push to fix this to keep their investments afloat. And as with communication standards before the internet, the players and the game remain mostly the same.

This isn't out of the goodness of anyone's heart. It's, quite literally, so Elon and Zuck don't blow up service investment and spying efforts overnight and losing a bunch of eyeballs. Consumers putting pressure on lawmakers helps, too.

And it doesn't fix everything, not by a long shot. But in a strange twist, it does make things easier for consumers suffering at the end of these cycles, especially when they happen all at once.

So I've seen lots of links back to Cory's essay since it was written (see last boost). Thing is, there's a fix in the form of common carrier law.

Basically, data portability and interop standards are likely to get laws passed in California and the EU. And there'll be support from state actors (China, etc) on those too, so they don't lose their investments when a service locks the API and folds in the last stage of the enshittification cycle.