Cory DoctorowOct 5, 2023

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

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Show threadnerdseyeview
@pluralistic i love how this is just like, "start a blog." i mean, i feel like the logical end of all this is... blogger, 1999?
Oct 5, 2023 at 3:19pmWeb
Show threadFeralRobotsOct 5, 2023
@nerdseyeview @pluralistic
This works on multiple levels. Remember what the search landscape was like in 1999? Getting that fragmented again.
Show threadNoel KellyOct 6, 2023

@FeralRobots @nerdseyeview @pluralistic

Let's remember WordPress only started in 2003.
Before then it was blogger.com etal, and everyone trying to corral you into their walled garden.

Show threadFeralRobotsOct 6, 2023

@gnoll110 @nerdseyeview @pluralistic
I was there. RSS existed. Blogger was one option; there were others. It wasn't turnkey, but then neither was WordPress, not really - not meaningfully more than, say, MoveableType.

"Walled Garden" usually means no interop, doesn't inherently mean easy data portability.

I saw ppl port Blogger to other platforms. Wasn't turnkey - but then it's not turnkey now. As audience broadens, standard for what constitutes 'turnkey' portability will get more rigorous.

Show threadnerdseyeviewOct 6, 2023
@FeralRobots @gnoll110 @pluralistic i mean, sure, hell, i hand coded an HTML site. i'm an gd internet dinosaur. but these old versions were not so easily turned to garbage by everyone trying monetize every god damn thing, and that's kind of the point.
Show threadnerdseyeviewOct 6, 2023
@FeralRobots @gnoll110 @pluralistic that walled garden was full of holes in the fence for sure, and it was easy to share, regardless of platform because it was (mostly) just open links.
Show threadNudeln Al Dente 🐘Oct 5, 2023
@nerdseyeview @pluralistic I've been seeing a bunch of reminders from tech people I follow to just have a blog, because then at least you have your content & history when you leave whatever enshittified platform you next leave. And they're reposts of reminders they were putting out 5, 10+ years ago so not to do with XFormerlyTwitter.
Show threadAlexandre Oliva (moved to @[email protected])Oct 5, 2023
aah, late 1990s, the peak of human civilization, according to the ultimate AI the built the Matrix