Cory Doctorow: "The Wit and Wisdom of #GeorgeW…" - Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

Fool Me Twice We Don't Get Fooled Again: There's a crucial difference between federatable and federated.

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

#Bluesky #Threads #Mastodon

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

The Wit and Wisdom of #GeorgeWBush (a very slim volume)

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

It’s not (just) that Bluesky’s board includes the guy who sold Twitter to Elon Musk. It’s not (just) that Threads is owned by Facebook, a cancer of a company founded to nonconsenually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads (incredibly, that was Facebook’s least terrible moment. It actually got worse after that).

It’s that neither of these services are actually federated. Both claim that this is coming. Both claim that they have the technical hooks to federate with other services when the time is ripe. But that time isn’t now.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing.

As George W Bush told us, “Fool me once, shame you. Fool me —you can’t get fooled again.”

Wise words.

#Facebook #Twitter #Bluesky

Aug 06, 2023, 04:03 PM··Web

81boosts·125favorites

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

How things fail is more important than how they work

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

Look, I’m 52 years old. I used to be way more interested in how things worked. Now I’m interested in how they fail. I don’t care how good the administration of Bluesky or Threads is today— I care about what happens if it sours tomorrow.

Facebook has broken so many promises. Remember when Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006 with the promise of being the pro-privacy alternative to MySpace? Remember when they told us they’d never collect and mine our data? They are liars, and we shouldn’t trust them.

But a company doesn’t have to be run by venal scumbags to put its own interests ahead of its users.

Many is the tech CEO who reasoned that selling out their users was the moral thing to do, because the alternative was firing dozens or hundreds of people who trusted them, quit their jobs, and jeopardized their mortgages and kids’ college funds to come work for the company.

Seen in that light, selling out your users is actually an act of noble self-sacrifice, in which your loyalty to your friends trumps even your pride in delivering a high-quality product.

#HardWonLessons #WisdomOfAge #GracefulFailureModes

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#UlyssesPacts are how wise people protect themselves from themselves

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

#FLOSS #CreativeCommons #IrrevocableLicenses

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

Talking about federating in the future shows humility and foresight.

You know what would show more humility and foresight?

Federating right now.

https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

I hear that the Bluesky developers are having conversations about how they design their service to protect themselves from their future selves. That shows an admirable degree of humility and foresight.

But you know what would show an even greater degree of humility and foresight?

Being federated.

Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends.

The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good, the more we tempt their managers to break their promises and never open up federation.

For the owners of a service, the fact that it is thriving as a standalone is a powerful siren song: why open this service up and share its bounty when it’s doing just fine as a walled garden?

#MoneyTalksBullshitWalks #DeedsNotWords #WeDontGetFooledAgain

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