Public forums should be publicly owned. These are essential social tools that allow us to have discussions with each other and shape our views and opinions. These forums must be operated in an open and transparent manner in a way that’s accountable to the public.

Privately owned platforms are neither neutral or unbiased. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned. When the content that a user produces does not fit with the interests of the platform it gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It’s possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they’re using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with.

This information is shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities. It’s clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. While it can be useful to participate on such platforms in order to agitate, educate, and recruit comrades, they should not be seen as open forums.

Open source platforms provide a viable alternative to corporate social media. These platforms are developed on a non-profit basis and are hosted by volunteers across the globe. A growing number of such platforms are available today and millions of people are using them already.

From that perspective I think that open and federated platforms. Instead of all users having accounts on the same server, federated platforms have many servers that all talk to each other to create the network. If you have the technical expertise, it’s even possible to run your own.

One important aspect of the Fediverse is that it’s much harder to censor and manipulate content than it is with centralized networks such as Reddit and BlueSky. There is no single company deciding what content can go on the network, and servers are hosted by regular people across many different countries and jurisdictions.

Open platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. It’s also more difficult for third parties to collect data since it doesn’t all conveniently live on the same server that some company owns. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads and tracker bloat.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook or Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that’s developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network. More users joining Mastodon is a net positive for Lemmy because we get more content and more people to have discussions with.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it’s actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens.

Marxist theory states that in order to be free, the workers must own the means of production. This idea is directly applicable in the context of social media. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

It’s time for us to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people.

Everyone has mentioned the drive for profit, I just want to give another example that’s more explicit:

• Revenue comes from advertising
• More ad views/engagement means more revenue
• This drives the company to create algorithms to increase engagement. For instance promoting rage bait so you stay on the site longer. This leads to other scummy things like racist or sexual content as well
• This drives the original community to fall apart as people are driven away (see enshittification)

Corporate social media requires making a profit to keep running. No matter how good it looks at the start, the main goal of a corporate social media is never to provide the best possible service to end users. The things you get to see and how you interact are not driven by interests and real friends, but by what gets the platform the most profit.

Obligatory “AI bad”. You should post what you spent effort writing, instead of letting a large language model subtly change its meaning.

As the other commenter mentioned, it will always go that way for profit.

With social media, the users aren’t the customers–the advertisers (and whoever is buying the data) are. Social media platforms often start out with a focus on the users, because they can’t be profitable without a large user base. But once that point is reached, everything is subject to the will of the customers. At that point, your experience doesn’t matter anymore. And it will always go this way.

There are a handful of ways to avoid this trend. One way is to ensure there is always a breadth of competition–that way, providers have to focus on a good user experience, otherwise their users will switch to a competitor. But this is nearly impossible with social media, because it’s non-trivial to “move” to another service.

Another way is to remove the profit motive. But the challenge then is finding some way to fund and build something like a social media platform. The Fediverse does this by distributing the cost and work among thousands of volunteers. In theory, a non-profit organization could do something similar, if they could secure funding, but even those are subject to shittifying themselves (see recent developments with Mozilla).

The distributed model has its challenges–one of the big ones is resisting those who would try to take the space and exploit it for those profits (for example, read about XMPP and Google Chat, and the “embrace, expand, extinguish” strategy). But it seems to have a very good chance to avoid those pitfalls–largely because running your own instance of these services is relatively accessible to many.

Capitalism and profit and the need to make more money is like rot, a fungus, a bacterial infection or a viral infection.

Any service product or idea you tie to capitalism will inevitably become infected to the point where you infection of wanting to make money will over ride everything. In the end, it has nothing to do with ideas, development, evolution or making things … it always devolves down to just wanting to make as much money as possible.

That is what destroys and devolves any and all social media today. It has nothing to do with social media … it has everything to do with making money and maximizing profits.

• $$$

Enshittification is a result of a company trying to squeeze more out from their customers this quarter than they did last quarter. That is because the line must always go up, so any wall St or investor first company becomes a profit first company. This is the westernized flavor of capitalism. Not all capitalism is profit first.