Earlier this evening I posted this on Mastodon:
Letterboxd is going to let you down. Best to start thinking about an escape plan today.
I’ve been thinking this about Letterboxd for some time. I see people pouring content into it, investing their memories into it, and I can’t help but worry for its future. Despite being founded by New Zealanders, it reeks of Silicon Valley. Maybe it’s the dropped “e,” I dunno.
It feels inevitable to me that Letterboxd will be bought by Amazon, or by Microsoft, or by…I dunno, Salesforce…and that it will come to be loathed. At first things will seem normal; we’ll be told the creatives will maintain full control of the product, etc., etc. Then crummy UX will begin to creep in. Invasive up-sells. The disabling of features that connect it to external products. I don’t need to detail the rest because we’ve all seen it so many times.
In the same Mastodon thread, I mentioned NeoDB as a “federated Letterboxd.” Never heard of NeoDB? It’s OK, nobody has. In their own words:
NeoDB is a self-hosted server tracking what you read/watch/listen/play, powering a global distributed community federating via ActivityPub.
Sounds great, right? But when you arrive at their flagship instance, neodb dot social, you’re greeted with a lot of what you might expect: poor UX, a dearth of content, semi-working features, etc. It’s not encouraging.
So, why was I compelled to direct people to it?
It was pointed out to me on Mastodon that, yes, Letterboxd might start to suck some day, but there was no particular reason to think that it especially would. They allow you to export your data, and, due to their popularity, that data format is likely to be anticipated by any future replacement of Letterboxd, should it just shutter one day (a near impossibility, to be sure). NeoDB clearly needs a lot of work; nobody’s there (network effect); it’s almost certain not to outlast Letterboxd.
If I’m advising “an escape plan” — what’s the escape plan from NeoDB, Einstein?
And of course, they’re right. Letterboxd looks nice, it doesn’t suck “yet,” everybody loves using it. I love nice things! I am adamantly not the kind of nerd who scorns people for being attracted to pleasant user experiences. I’m a designer[ASTERISK]!
But…
I am also dismayed to see what happened to Twitter. To watch whole swaths of the internet be deleted. To watch the new incoming US government shred public data and resources. To watch all my online interactions be mediated through some billionaire or other’s hands and Google Analytics dashboards.
Things like ActivityPub and Mastodon (and yes, NeoDB) offer us a way out of that. They have many serious flaws, no doubt. But it increasingly seems to me that the only alternative to the inevitability of surveillance capitalism is the open web. That means interoperability. That means open source. That means “protocols, not platforms.”
Would I tell my brother, for instance, or one of my non-programmer friends (gasp!) to join NeoDB over Letterboxd? Hell no. But I would rather spend an hour forking NeoDB and fixing some text overflow CSS than an hour curating a list on Letterboxd.
All of my data is going to be lost some day. Every piece of software is going to “let me down” sooner or later. But where I spend my time, my energy, and my words — that’s who I’m rooting for.
And I want to root for the open web.