How the recent h1b drama got me thinking about the future of the fediverse
This might be slightly off-topic, but I wanted a place to jot down my thoughts regarding a recent event that ended up involving a junction of US politics, immigration, and the fediverse vs enshitification.
I was having a discussion on an old style (non-federated) forum with someone (ref: https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/daily-commute-detroit-windsor-h1b-and-canada-pr.501011/post-11096394 ) and had a very insightful conversation on why folks still resort to using spez's website.
The source of the topic has been discussed elsewhere on the fediverse (see for example https://piefed.social/post/1283563 ) - but in this case it was down to an affected person (an h1b visa holder worried about traveling between the US and Canada) asking for advice. The only communities that were able to offer help seemed to exist on spez's site.
(The short summary is that affected folks were being advised to cancel all travel and do whatever it takes to be in the US by 11:59pm ET on that Friday. Later the admin walked it back and said it'd only affect new applications but not e.g. extensions, meaning - despite having Sept 21 2025 as the date in the proclamation - it wouldn't have practical effect for anyone until Feb 2026, which is when a new lottery will be held and new applications will start getting approved.)
The forumiverse (the part of the fediverse devoted to forum-like posts and threads) doesn't do it, since there's no real communities that support immigration and the like. (I started ![email protected] a short while ago but still have zero subscribers.) Even the wider fediverse didn't have much. I was finally able to track down a couple of Bluesky posts (skeets?) that covered what to do, but a random lawyer's Bluesky feed doesn't seem like the right place to get support for one's questions.
I thought that traditional immigration forums would cover it (and really, this is the sole reason why I still use forums), but as it turns out, not so much. It turns out that they more or less ignored this development over the weekend, and still haven't covered it as of the time I'm writing this. (The other gap that I've noticed on the fediverse and forums is with communities for third culture kids - but afaik even spez's site has only the one.)
I am not sure what the right answer here is, as we can't just create such communities overnight. But as long as we don't have an answer, companies like spez will be able to maintain a foothold. Enshitification will continue.
I'm sure this won't happen. We will find a solution. I'm just not sure how we get from here to there yet - and I think it's important to acknowledge the gaps that still exist. The first step in solving a problem is admitting that one exists.
I last signed into or contributing to Reddit years ago. However, like your situation here, I occasionally have to read it for an answer someone else gave to some problem I'm working. As bad as Reddit is, I am thankful that the alternative location for these answer is not Facebook. At least Reddit can still be read-only without any kind of account or sign in. As bad as spez's animal is, it is far better than the meta monster in this regard.
Back when I first left, I moved on to kbin.social - and oh boy, a lot of us were there. Back then, the answer to some of this was to archive the answers found on spez's site and then share or repost on kbin.social itself, so we could rebuild the communities - or at least provide alternative communities.
True, agreed. In fairness that site does a lot of things right - a permabanned account can still read everything, it's not much different from being logged out. And you can still grab a copy of your data after being banned fairly easily by making a GDPR/CCPR request (even if you aren't covered by either law). That's more than I can say for all my stuff on kbin.social for example (I can recover a small amount on other instances but there's a lot that never federated off of kbin.social which I presume to now be lost for good.)
Edit: And Facebook - I luckily didn't have to deal with this but I've heard of folks having to file lawsuits to get their family pictures back after a bot bans them. So yeah, miles ahead.
Being in Canada, I can say that the way Facebook attempted to heavy-handle the "pay for news" bit - including suppressing news BEFORE the law changed - left a very sour taste in my mouth. I agree 100% - but Facebook really did set the bar low here.
Well, take the case of u/awkwardtheturtle. Permanently banned with no appeal and no way to reach a human for help who can actually do anything. (It's quite possible awkwardtheturtle was deserving, but I know of many great former kbinners who were in the same situation. Often for no apparent reason, or if there was a reason, it was related to supporting the blackout and the protests.) So in some policies they're just as bad.
It's great as a read-only site, but if you need to ask for help...
Remember that spez's site only recently became profitable. If they're better than Facebook, part of it may be that they're smaller and weaker as a company, so in some ways they have to be nicer. Less monopoly.
And also .. Twitter? I liked the original edition, they seemed very fair and principled. But we all know what happened to Twitter in the end. And spez likes Musk a lot including how Musk runs former Twitter (see for example https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700 ), so I can easily see him supporting the sale of the company at some point to someone worse.
Basically, the TDLR is that I agree with you - but I also would caution that we can't be comfortable with having information live only on spez's site.