221
submitted 1 year ago by JRepin@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] HoloPengin@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know if I'd call it monopolized exactly. It's not like we can't get alternative email accounts from other companies to corporate to encrypted to private server, etc.

Google absolutely has the most say in what's correct about the protocol/security because they're the de-facto standard for individual user accounts, but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

[-] JGrffn@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

Nothing except gmail's very strict and hard to follow guidelines for spam filtering. Whether it's a byproduct of spam filtering or whether it's the intended result, the fact that Google essentially controls email traffic means you're not gonna have a good time communicating with others using your self-hosted email. This issue has been raised by self-hosters getting blacklisted, all the way to companies getting rate limited. If your intended use is to communicate with your everyday person, and considering the everyday person probably uses Gmail, you're in for a bad time at some point down the line.

this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
221 points (97.8% liked)

Technology

34973 readers
251 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS