this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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While we're calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you've gone from "there’s no indication that will happen" to "there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will". But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.
I didn't say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don't throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.
It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.
By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT's account portability feature. That's nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.
Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don't get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don't have to, but hey can.
That's a failure state of the system itself; it can't properly bring its strengths to bear. And that's precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.
While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.
No, I have not backpedalled my argument. You can't claim I said a thing I didn't say and then accuse me of changing my position for restating my point. I mean, you can, but it's some bullshit and it's not gonna fly. That's why I don't like calling out these things in public, it really brings the Google out of people.
I claimed there is no indication that it will happen the first time, you claimed that I was saying it would definitely not happen and I restated that no, what I said is there was no indication that it would go one way or the other. So no, there is no indication that it will happen.
You can keep pushing your hypothetical all you want, it won't get any or more likely. You've decided to make up that scenario in reverse, because you have chosen a football team to support and are now imagining ways to justify that selection. The exact same scenario could be played out in reverse. If you're building a doomsday scenario out of whole cloth you can get as convoluted as you want and say it seems likely to you. I could poke holes on it, and there are plenty to be poked, but that'd require accepting the premise and arguing about the hypothetical instead of reality. That's why it's a frequent fallacious argument in the first place. So we're not doing that.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the argument you're doing mental gymnastics to bypass is still that interoperability and decentralization only actualize when people need to move. The amount of concentration prior to people moving is, and remains, irrelevant, at least in relation to the importance of the feature existing in the first place.