i don't know that any service has enjoyed an enshittification arc quite as steep as meetup.com, which briefly seemed like a revolutionary and essential utility and now seems like a scammy, spammy backwater.
i'm sorry for it too, because in its heyday i think it genuinely did lubricate and encourage in-person civil society. nothing as convenient and effective has emerged to supersede it.
🅰️ ®️ ✝️ U
@interfluidity Maybe we'd need some worldwide guarantee of stable ip adresses and some nice open source click-to-add-service self hosting basics?
If anything not selfhostable p2p like fedi falls to crap, the case for those services is lost by default, right?
@admitsWrongIfProven yeah, i agree, ultimately architecture is destiny and profit-motivated, centralized, near-monopoly platforms are destined to enshittify.
@interfluidity I wonder if there was some realistic model for smartphone infrastructure - from what i understand, the industry needs to be nuked from orbit and i see no similar solution like selfhosting.
@interfluidity One part of why i said "nuked from orbit" is that they are so essential (which is a choice!) while personalized (via the sim).
@admitsWrongIfProven people have tried some open-source hardware, some-variant-of-linux-running phones, right? (obviously i haven’t.)
one perhaps saving grace is that smartphones are so prominent and essential that regulatory and antitrust authorities take note and sometimes act, especially in Europe (less corrupted by Apple and Google and claims of being a home-team champion).