Enshittification and Owning Your Own Land

Owning Your Land

“Don’t build your house on land that you rent.”

I saw this somewhere today (lost exactly where, so I can’t link to it). The basic premise is don’t create all your stuff somewhere that someone else owns. We’ve seen this play out with Facebook and Twitter. Now more than ever, it is possible to own your own website and post to it. Not only that, but with the Fediverse, you can also automatically have those posts show up on a social media site. This was incredibly hard in the past. Thus, we were forced to choose between having your own website and the network effect of other sites.

In the past, it was difficult to own your website and leverage that to an audience. Developing an audience was difficult and limited. Thus, many of us felt as though we had to choose:

Own your information and posts
OR
Have a chance at an audience and interaction

It wasn’t that many of us were looking for a huge audience, we were just looking for connection and interaction. Twitter was actually a huge part of successfully creating that audience/connections. After quite the run, we know how Twitter has turned out.

The Indie Web has long been focused on people owning their own material and interoperating. However, even the Indie Web was too complex and “fiddily” for most people. Recent advances have made connection and self-ownership much easier.