Enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author of The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse:
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
“Enshittification,” Cory Doctorow’s coinage describing the process by which internet media platforms become increasingly unusable and un-quittable, has been named 2023’s “Digital Word of the Year.” Here, we break down what the term means and Doctorow’s solution to the internet’s relentless enshittification.
The main driving force for enshittification is relentless greed for more profit. So the rules of the system matter, if they can’t own the users accounts that changes the possible strategies and likely outcomes.
Of course it’s possible that the sabotage the fediverse or that it sabotages itself but the underlying “energy” which feeds it development is different. And that matters.
This is part of the neoliberal propaganda, making people believe that greed does not have an effect on quality or morality of behavior, and of course that governments or non-profit can never be “efficient”. But that is mostly baseless.
You totally can create institutions with a different agenda or mandate than profit and it works. Of course they can also be captured or sabotaged.