Enshittification

In the Programming Room of the Loft, November 9, 2026.

I really don't get what the stir about "enshittification" is. Startups fill niches that nobody has filled because its financially impractical, and then have no choice but to turn against their users.

I sincerely have to ask, if you hate Microsoft's GitHub so much, the fact that it doesn't work, why do you choose to use it? Hosting git repos is not hard, and hosting static files is not expensive (Microsoft's GitHub will let you do it for free).

Its not like Microsoft's GitHub has just been out there, waiting for people to adopt, Microsoft markets this stuff. So its obviously the fault of the people pushing for monopolies when monopolies form. You can blame someone for using free services that they should know aren't financially sustainable, right?

Maybe people are uninformed, ignorant, or just don't care when they are made into products by what they consume.

Oh, I guess Discord sucks now? Lets all move to stoat, a platform with an identical financial model to Discord, I'm sure things will turn out fine. Stoat is actively poisoning the collective angst against Discord by giving an equally bad but more appealing option. If Discord started a product called "Discord 2" that looked identical to how Discord did 5 years ago, would we all celebrate?

No! It will have the same fate, what the hell else would happen? Looking for free services that cost money to run is a fools errand. But if someone made a Discord alternative where servers had to pay for hosting, and microtransactions were there from the start, people would choose Stoat over this service!

I'm sorry but this is a user problem. If you also feel this way, then spread the word. Explain this to people. "Fight against the system" sounds too corny, but yeah. pinchord.git is a thing, and it does literally everything and more that I wanted out of Microsoft's strangling of a FOSS tool. People have to send patches, oh no! They can't use their Microsoft GitHub account to inundate my projects with Slop Pull Requests! Whatever will we do! We must capitulate to Microsoft, there's simply no other way.

I'm not sure how soon it will be, but eventually I will have chat rooms on this site for projects like Pinchord and Bowmap that rely on Discord right now. Do the same. If I start making videos again, they will be here, not on Google's Video Platform Company Monopoly Service Fuckery.

Edit: Chat rooms <--