Stephen CollinsMar 17

Mastodon is 100% the early days of social media all over. Some of you will already be familiar with this story.

My weather station (a very nice Netatmo that has served very well) crapped out after nearly 10 years of excellent service. I asked for recommendations here for a new station that would play nicely with #HomeAssistant, and hopefully, also HomeKit. I received *many* recommendations, with Ecowitt (and the brands it manufactures for) taking the lead.

A connection on here offered me their *unopened* Ecowitt weather station for a very generous price. It arrived yesterday, and I set it up, and it's already doing a great job. Works offline, talks to Home Assistant without any problems. I just need to do a couple of bits of configuration jiggery-pokery and it will pass data to HomeKit.

This is very much how things were when I first joined Twitter in 2007. In spite of attempts at #enshittification of everything, the #fediverse is putting up a good fight.

May your day online be as satisfying as mine was yesterday.

LATER EDIT: I’ve been thinking, and I do realise this good experience isn’t necessarily what happens for everyone. It’s still the case that too many good people don’t find a welcoming place here, especially if they are queer or of color. If this is you, know that I see you, and that I will always try to be welcoming and listening, even if you have things to say that bring me discomfort.

Show threadSimon ZerafaMar 17

@trib

Usenet and IRC were very similar back in the second age of Middle Earth 🙂

Very useful and helpful, then became enshitified.

We moved on to something new, like old Twitter before that turned to fascism.

Show threadDexterMar 17
@simonzerafa @trib I've never touched Usenet and barely used IRC. Would you be willing to talk a little more about how those got enshittified? I'm a little confused as that doesn't jive with my understanding of what that word means.
Show threadStephen Collins

@wheeljack @simonzerafa this could get long…

Also, I am an internet old. I’ve been online since the early 90s and on the internet since
1995. I have some very rose colored glasses.

Once upon a time, those services (and others) that underpinned what was the major functions of the internet were everything. If you wanted to chat, ask questions, move files, etc., you had to use them. ISPs owned servers that hosted mirrors of various kinds, as did universities and public institutions. Eventually, so did things like Yahoo! and Google. You could log on to a server anywhere and your messages would propagate out to everywhere.

Over time, as people moved to using the big corporate services, they wrapped things like Usenet up into other services like Google Groups, muddying the initial intent of those things, and polluting them with paid and corporate equivalents. Over time, with the migration to those big capitalist platforms, people used the older services less and less. Eventually the big platforms shut them down and replaced them with their walled gardens.

Enshittification by stealth and replacement over time.

Those early services often did one thing and did it really well. No ads. No algorithms. Just the thing you wanted to do, stripped down to basics, and working every time. The big corporate services that replaced them usually tried to be all things to all people (Facebook is the most glaring example of this) and rapidly evolved into ad platforms that tried to trap you in.

Progress is a good thing. “Progress” in the name of walled gardens and selling more ads is enshittification writ large.

Mar 17 at 10:15pmWeb
Show threadDexterMar 18

@trib I appreciate you typing that all out.

Where my confusion lies is that doesn't feel like it fits the definition of enshittification. As I understand it, enshittification is the result of an active decision that benefits the company at the cost of the user experience, (e.g. the addition of inline ads in a feed). However IRC and Usenet weren't actively made worse, they were abandoned in favor or options that appeared to be easier/better/more convenient (and then those options enshittified).

I suppose this could just be me being pedantic. I really do try to not be a dirty prescriptivist where language is concerned.

Show threadStephen CollinsMar 18

@wheeljack I’m taking a pretty broad definition, for sure.

There are even places you can still find bits of active Usenet, but not many, and very incomplete. It’s a real shame. It’s the place I built my first online friendships.