Hypervigilant supertaster and bibliophile. I am not a bot! I am a human being!

  • 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • So what? We’ll create one!

    Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon’s. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.

    And then GoodReads announced that they’d sold out to Amazon. Apparently they’d been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.

    As for the database we created, I guess it’s Amazon’s now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.





  • All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?

    It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.