Enshittification Arises from Enclosure
Kaliya Young · 2026-06-24
Every closed platform follows the same arc. It courts users with generosity, encloses them once they can't leave, then extracts until the experience rots. We have a name for the rot now — enshittification — but the mechanism underneath it is older: enclosure. You cannot degrade what people are free to walk away from.
Project Weave's answer is not a better platform. It is a protocol layer that keeps the gate open by design — portable identity, portable community, portable trust. If your group can pick up its people and its history and move, no operator can hold it hostage, and the incentive to decay disappears.
Open protocols are not merely a technical preference. They are the structural precondition for infrastructure that regenerates instead of captures.