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.
@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).