Anything under direct corporate control will enshittify. It has nothing to do with mission, values, direction, purpose, or any other bullshit in the charter of a service. If it is controlled by an entity with shareholders turning a profit, it will enshittify, because those shareholders will demand ever increasing profit for their investments. It is a one-way process.
But Signal Messenger, LLC is indeed a corporation, and it operates officially as a subsidiary of the Signal Foundation. The Signal protocol, as well as the official app, is developed by the LLC and not by the foundation.
In any event, there is plenty of room for a future enshittification of Signal. Is it less likely than many other entities? That’s probably a fair statement. Is it impossible? Not in the least.
The direct counter to enshittification is interoperability: the ability to pack up your content (likes, followers, messages, uploads) and import it into another service provider.
Since Signal is open source and mostly FOSS, you can theoretically create a Signal fork that can import Signal backups. I know because this program can read such backups and convert them into other formats. Ideally, the Atlantic reporter could have exported a Signal backup with the offending group chat messages before they expired.
The only thing I want from companies is just a little transparency and a paid option to opt out.
“Facebook is free, but we will mine the balls off your data, monitor everything you do, we will control your feed and you cant customise anything. Or for $20 a month, we wont mine or track you, your feed and how it works is totally customisable”
Just put a number to it and let me decide if my privacy and experience is worth the money.
Anything under direct corporate control will enshittify. It has nothing to do with mission, values, direction, purpose, or any other bullshit in the charter of a service. If it is controlled by an entity with shareholders turning a profit, it will enshittify, because those shareholders will demand ever increasing profit for their investments. It is a one-way process.
so Signal too?
Yes indeed.
What?
While Signal and the structure of how signal is managed has flaws.
It is not a coorporation and therefore has no need to enshitify
it’s a “non profit organisation”, just like OpenAI once was
The Signal Foundation is not a corporation.
But Signal Messenger, LLC is indeed a corporation, and it operates officially as a subsidiary of the Signal Foundation. The Signal protocol, as well as the official app, is developed by the LLC and not by the foundation.
In any event, there is plenty of room for a future enshittification of Signal. Is it less likely than many other entities? That’s probably a fair statement. Is it impossible? Not in the least.
It’s a non-profit.
OpenAI was a non-profit. Then they built something that could earn a profit, stopped being a non-profit, and immediately began to enshittify.
The Susan G. Komen foundation is a non-profit that enshittified with a “pinkwashing” scandal.
“Corporation” is not the predictive factor. “Centralized” is. Any centralized system is subject to the shitty whims of the operators.
The direct counter to enshittification is interoperability: the ability to pack up your content (likes, followers, messages, uploads) and import it into another service provider.
Since Signal is open source and mostly FOSS, you can theoretically create a Signal fork that can import Signal backups. I know because this program can read such backups and convert them into other formats. Ideally, the Atlantic reporter could have exported a Signal backup with the offending group chat messages before they expired.
The only thing I want from companies is just a little transparency and a paid option to opt out.
“Facebook is free, but we will mine the balls off your data, monitor everything you do, we will control your feed and you cant customise anything. Or for $20 a month, we wont mine or track you, your feed and how it works is totally customisable”
Just put a number to it and let me decide if my privacy and experience is worth the money.
20$ is ridiculous. 1-2 would be reasonable.
What they ask for isnt the point, just give me the option to decide for myself. 1