If you take a broader view of enshittification (than Doctorows’ original formulation, good as it is), as has been happening to the word, you can apply deshittification to things like right to repair, inter-operability, repeal of reverse engineering felonization, even straight up open source. I actually think it could be a useful umbrella term.
Comment on Deshittification
droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Well the thing about enshitification is that it was always basically inevitable. These platforms only cared so much about UX early on because they wanted growth and didn’t mind being unprofitable in the short term in order to grow and dominate the market. Now that they have, they care about monetizing that growth. I don’t think deshitification of a platform is likely. The owners have no incentive to, unless they lose enough users. Inertia, and network effects makes that really hard.
Deshitification through new platforms meanwhile? Possible. I can honestly say people on the fediverse are so much nicer than Reddit, and the platforms themselves have so much more variaty, better customization and UX options. Plus they’re open source (which reddit initially was). The problem is the inactivity, and the overwhelmingness of US-politics and negativity.
MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
I subscribed to the new community this thread is about; but then again, your comment does kinda make me think that there are already communities like !freesoftware@lemmy.zip or !libreculture@lemmy.ca or !right2repair@discuss.tchncs.de which should cover a lot of the topics that may be discussed there. Let’s see whether anything unique ends up actually talked about there. :P
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
The problem is the inactivity, and the overwhelmingness of US-politics and negativity
US politics is overwhelming because of the military right controlled by a deranged pedo and his merry band of halfwit thugs.
I mean, just by comparison, the most terrible thing happening outside America is perhaps in Ukraine and Gaza; but no Ukranians or Gazans believe their current flight is the best thing for them, where 1/3+ of voting Americans actually believe they’re on the best track and prosperity is somehow right around the corner. And guns.
American news is popular for the same schadenfreude reasons that keeps indolent reality TV ‘stars’ in business …except with the added threat of invasion everywhere for the motherland.
Emotional_Series7814@piefed.zip 5 days ago
I specifically only ever look at Subscribed, never Hot or All or Local specifically to dodge all the US politics. As an American.
chickenf622@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I was more interpreting the community name as deshittifying your own personal experience with different technologies that are FOSS or at the very least open source. Would be a good place to post when companies are forced to (or even choose) to do something that is significantly more consumer friendly.
Auster@thebrainbin.org 5 days ago
I made the community pretty open-ended, so I guess both count.
Also, on using alternatives being a type of deshittification, I'd say even that with competition around, the original or more prevalent tool needs to seek ways to be better as to not lose market share.
JGrffn@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I think concentration of market share itself is an issue. I just got banned from WhatsApp, twice in a row, by the automated spam banhammer they have, and I fully expect to get banned a third time as soon as their registration retry timeout expires in like 18 fucking hours (I’ve been at this since Friday).
I hate Meta as much as anyone else around here, but I’ve essentially been cut off from my entire community with this single event (which, to clarify, is a completely unwarranted ban that has been reverted by WhatsApp twice now). Everyone uses WhatsApp for their hustles, businesses, friend groups, neighborhood groups, etc. I have tried for YEARS to get a movement going to at least consider installing alternatives. I’m now left with signal which has 1 contact, and telegram which a ton of people downloaded during a whatsapp outage during the pandemic, but which nobody uses anymore because… WhatsApp came back rather quickly.
The lack of interop and lack of any usage of email on WhatsApp for anything other than support tickets, means I might need to ditch my phone number, which I’ve had for 20 years, because Meta’s AI got trigger happy with me for some obscure reason that not even they seem to understand.
Something that truly pisses me off about this specific conversation is, people in the privacy circles can’t quite seem to grasp just how much of a stranglehold Meta has on its communities. There’s 0 chance of me being able to get even a fraction of the people I interact with to use something other than WhatsApp. I’ve tried multiple times through the years and I have never been able to do anything about it, and it quite frankly pisses me off that the general response to someone using WhatsApp around here is “just stop using it and get your friends to stop too lol wtf why you such a lil bitch” as if we don’t live in a society that depends on these fucking monopolies because that’s how they were designed. You quite literally can’t opt for alternatives or go against the flow on this because it can result in you being cut off from your entire community, and as much as anyone here likes to LARP that they’re post-apocalyptic survivors who can and do live by themselves or whatever, that’s not the world we live in.
Some stuff needs to become interoperable, their concentrated market share usage needs to directly correlate to how much regulatory oversight they receive, and ideally it should either be diversified or government-owned if the concentration is too high and can’t be reversed. All of this can only happen through legislation, and clearly legislation isn’t doing shit because the EU’s DMA should have me connecting into the WhatsApp network from other apps already.