Discussion
Personally I think it's a bit of a both/and. Because why did we get deregulation, Walled Gardens, DMCA criminalising unauthorised modification, and union busting? Because a financial extractor class, including VCs and the people who buy shares in IPOs, thought they could hoard more wealth that way. Because they had the political power to impose this enshittigenic environment on digital tech.
If you couldn't get rents from other people's work that way, would they have bothered?
(3/3)
Rabble and George briefly discuss #NeoCities. Just a reminder that it's a thing;
"... a social network of 1,373,800 web sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to create your own web site."
All source code is published under free licenses;
"I think there is something fundamentally broken with the model of Silicon Valley. Of VCs companies, that found companies, that either have to grow big to go to IPO themselves, or get acquired."
@rabble, 2025
https://revolution.social/episodes/our-mission-is-to-keep-flickr-pictures-visible-for/
This is the argument @Rushkoff made in his 2016 book 'Throwing Rocks ...'.
Around the same time Throwing Rocks was published, @aral Balkan made the same argument in this presentation;
https://aperi.tube/w/ce2dc942-d141-4828-803d-5f0c28d5393e
(1/2)
From our POV - as people who've had to hunt for resources to start online projects - the strings attached to various sources of funding still matter a lot.
But one of @pluralistic's more challenging arguments is that the VC funding model is not a key driver of enshittification. He argues that in a digital industry subject to regulation, including mandating interoperability and Right to Repair (and modify), and to unionised labour, VC funding, IPO and acquisition wouldn't be a problem.
(2/3)
Personally I think it's a bit of a both/and. Because why did we get deregulation, Walled Gardens, DMCA criminalising unauthorised modification, and union busting? Because a financial extractor class, including VCs and the people who buy shares in IPOs, thought they could hoard more wealth that way. Because they had the political power to impose this enshittigenic environment on digital tech.
If you couldn't get rents from other people's work that way, would they have bothered?
(3/3)
"When Katharina and I would greet everybody personally ... that kind of thing shouldn't scale, because it's about personal connection. You can't scale that. But now these services that we see online are so slippery, before you know it, you're in the service and ... *publishing* things."
#GeorgeOates, 2025
https://revolution.social/episodes/our-mission-is-to-keep-flickr-pictures-visible-for/
(Emphasis mine)
(1/?)
This conversation between @rabble and George about Flickr makes me wonder if @bonfire could be used to build a distributed version of a community image platform. Bonfire Visual?
Curious to see if a UX like this is already being built in an ActivityPub project I haven't heard of yet, or on top of any other protocol.
(2/2)
We've briefly considered something like that (also for sharing art like on deviantart.com though would probably need to figure out how to deal with machine generated content...) but we're focused on other use cases (listed at https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community#/section/what-were-building-next-4672931) so it's a case of #somebodycould... though we'll probably make some steps in that direction in any case with simple things like https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/1310 and https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire-app/issues/688
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
