The cost of convenience

It seems that the latest delusions of Zuckerberg was finally enough for a lot of people to move out of Meta empire and start to explore new grounds. Just like Elon Musk growing dangerous attitude helped people leave X to go to either what the Activity Pub protocol proposed (Mastodon and the likes) or to Bluesky.

In the last years, several platforms have come to rise and try to topple the giants (and the likes), or at least to propose something new. As Antitrust laws were slowly destroyed, we let those companies become giants, encompassing all aspects of our lives, making it harder and harder to move from them.

Those platforms play on several major laws in user experience. The first one is The Network Effet, the more users they have, the harder it is to move from them as you risk losing contact (or so you think) with people, family, friends, ... Moving to a new service that is still in its early stage is also realizing that before a lot of people arrive, things will be way calmer than you are used to (and it's normal, you just don't remember the beginnings of those platforms).

The second one is the Lock in effect, where those platforms do their best to block you from moving out. It goes from segregating your contacts into their own format and slowly cutting features, forcing the creation of an account when you share pictures, videos, ... Everything that goes against any open web principles and force you into their walls to experience anything or to communicate with anyone inside it.

On top of that, and I think this is the more dangerous, those platforms have the advantage of convenience. When someone uses an application or website, their expectations are set by this experience (hence why your work software are usually so frustrating), and anything that propose less than that is automatically seen as worse.

Facebook, X and the likes had years to evolve, grow into monopolistic monsters, but also to fine tune their user experience. It goes from easily finding your contacts, messaging them, to the simplicity of bringing everyone together in an event and seeing it grow organically, but also through simple things like proposing a dark mode (yes, that's enough apparently to excuse Meta owner becoming a full fledged fascist).

While several users will move from those monopolistic structures, a lot of the others don't have the same depth of conviction. They know that Meta is becoming worse and worse, but the smallest frustration in their experience brings them back to the behemoths.

Be it the slow start of Bluesky where people had to arrive for it to become lively, to Pixelfed rising to topple Instagram but without an application to begin with (they have one now, worry not!). Wether we want it or not, a majority of users have become use to a high level of convenience that is hard to reach and while Silicon Valley's Mad Genius Actions become more and more frightening , it still doesn't seem enough for the majority of people.

I still believe than a future based on open web principles, interoperability and a variety of actors (be it decentralized or not) is possible, but it's something we have to fight for. Each of us has a role to play in moving their friends and family away from the platforms, first by moving out of them and then either by showing the alternatives or building your own digital garden and forcing people to read websites again, outside the applications.

This is a work of education, it will take time, but I think it is vital if we want to live in a world where the Silicon Valley Giants are not deciding on everything we see, read and talk about (and frankly, I'm fucking tired of American puritanism).

It will require us to show the positive sides of the new platforms while also explaining that newcomers won't find everything they are used to... and that's normal! Because those platforms also offer something different: Bluesky offers moderation lists and labels that do a great work of providing a healthier experience and cutting off trolls, Pixelfed doesn't destroy the quality of the pictures you upload to it and provides great privacy settings, ActivityPub (Mastodon and the likes) provides hundreds of different usages, applications, allowing a wide range of experimentations, ...

I don't know if it will be enough, and honestly there are several times where I wanted to give up and rest back in convenience. But I know more and more that the world proposed by Meta and X is something I absolutely don't want to live in and neither do I want anymore let America decide what I can show, write and tell in my digital life (yay for European alternatives). And I don't want to see our democracies sacrificed for convenience anymore.