The Year of Unshittification: Reclaiming the Digital Commons

I. The Turning of the Tide

The digital ecosphere is undergoing a significant transformation. After nearly two decades of users surrendering digital lives to platforms that promised connection but delivered extraction, a counter-movement has emerged. 2026 marks what Unearth Heritage Foundry designates the Year of Unshittification. Millions of people characterize this moment by choosing to leave the deteriorating agoras of Big Tech. Instead, they build sovereign castles and tend independent gardens, grounding their stories in owned soil.

The term "enshittification," coined by writer and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022, describes the inevitable decay of digital platforms. They begin by attracting users with genuine value. Subsequently, the operators exploit those users to attract business customers. Ultimately, both constituencies are squeezed to maximize shareholder returns until nothing remains but a "pile of shit."¹ The American Dialect Society recognized the phenomenon by naming "enshittification" their Word of the Year for 2023, while Australia's Macquarie Dictionary followed suit in 2024.² Originating as sardonic internet slang, the term has become the definitive framework for understanding why once-beloved platforms have become intolerable.

Enshittification, however, is not destiny. The current moment represents its dialectical opposite—a grassroots movement of digital reclamation refusing the premise that identities must be rented from corporations. The unshittification of 2026 signifies not merely an exodus but a homecoming. Users are returning to the foundational promise of the web: that anyone may own a piece of it and that words may live on ground controlled by their author. In this revived model, communities form without a landlord extracting rent from every interaction.

The following analysis traces the contours of this transformation through the lens of archaeobytology—the study of digital artifacts as evolving entities within native ecosystems.³ This examination focuses on the forces driving the migration away from centralized platforms, the infrastructures emerging to support digital sovereignty, and the philosophical implications of owning ground in an age of platform feudalism.

II. The Architecture of Extraction

Understanding unshittification requires excavation of the structures it opposes. Platforms dominating the 2010s and early 2020s operated on what scholars term the "two-sided market" model—positioning themselves as intermediaries between users and businesses, holding each hostage to the other while capturing a growing share of the value flowing between participants.⁴ Such dynamics constituted a core architectural feature rather than an accidental bug.

Consider the trajectory of the platform once called Twitter. In its early years, it functioned as something approaching a digital public square—imperfect, but generative. Journalists found sources. Activists coordinated movements. Researchers shared findings. Communities coalesced around shared interests. The platform's value derived from the collective labor of its users, who created the content, built the networks, and established the norms that made the space worth inhabiting.

Extraction followed soon after. Algorithmic feeds replaced chronological timelines, prioritizing engagement over relevance and outreach over insight. Advertising interests shaped what could be seen and by whom. Platform owners began to wield positions not as stewards of a commons but as landlords of a company town, changing rules whenever it suited corporate interests. When Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022 and rebranded it as X, the acquisition accelerated dynamics already well underway, transforming what remained of the public square into what many users experienced as a vector for a personal political agenda.⁵

The exodus that followed was telling. By late 2024, millions of users had migrated to Bluesky, a decentralized alternative that gained over a million new users in a single week following the U.S. presidential election.⁶ Scientists, journalists, and public intellectuals led the way, signaling that they no longer saw X as a viable space for professional discourse.⁷ The European Federation of Journalists announced it would cease posting on the platform entirely.⁸ Major news organizations followed. What had been the default venue for real-time public conversation fragmented into a diaspora.

But the X exodus, significant as it was, represents only one current in a much larger tide. The same dynamics of enshittification have degraded platform after platform. Facebook, which Doctorow describes as "terminally enshittified," has become a wasteland of algorithmic manipulation and advertising fraud.⁹ Instagram prioritizes Reels over the photo-sharing that made it culturally significant. LinkedIn has devolved into what one observer called "hustle culture propaganda dressed in business casual."¹⁰ TikTok's algorithm is so effective at capturing attention that legislators have deemed it a national security threat.

The pattern is consistent: platforms begin by serving users, shift to serving advertisers, and end by serving only themselves. The technical term for this is rent-seeking—extracting value without creating it, using market position rather than innovation to generate returns.¹¹ The cultural term is betrayal.

III. The Fediverse and the Promise of Federation

The first wave of resistance to platform consolidation came not from a new competitor but from a new architecture. The Fediverse—a collection of interconnected social networks built on the ActivityPub protocol—represents a fundamental reimagining of what social media could be.¹² Rather than a single corporation controlling the infrastructure, thousands of independently operated instances compose the Fediverse. Each instance maintains its own governance, norms, and communities, yet all communicate with one another through an open standard.

Mastodon, the most prominent Fediverse platform, experienced significant growth in late 2022 when Musk's acquisition of Twitter prompted a mass migration. By 2024, the Fediverse had grown to over 14 million users across more than 23,000 instances.¹³ But more significant than the numbers is the model itself. Users choose which instance to join based on its values and moderation policies. Administrators maintain servers as community service rather than profit centers. Consequently, the network remains resilient because no single point of failure can bring down the whole system.

Such mobility exemplifies digital sovereignty in action—not the illusion of choice within a walled garden, but control over the terms of participation. When an instance administrator makes decisions a user disagrees with, migration allows the user to move to a different instance while retaining followers. When a community wants to establish specific norms, members can spin up a dedicated server. Switching costs that lock users into corporate platforms do not exist in a federated model.

The Fediverse also embodies what archaeobytology terms autogravitas—intrinsic authority that does not depend on external validation.¹⁴ A Mastodon post has weight not because an algorithm deemed it worthy of distribution, but because humans chose to amplify it through their own networks. The architecture refuses the premise that a central authority should determine speech value.

Critics argue that the Fediverse is too fragmented, too technical, or too confusing for ordinary users. Such criticisms contain validity but overlook the primary point. Confusion stems from decades of conditioning to expect that external entities will manage digital lives. Learning to navigate the Fediverse requires the same kind of skill-building involved in maintaining a garden—effort is required, but the effort itself is valuable. Digital literacy becomes a practice rather than a product.

IV. The Return of the Personal Website

While the Fediverse represents architectural resistance to platform power, another movement has been gathering force: the revival of personal websites. After years of funneling writing, photography, and creative work through platform feeds, people are rediscovering the dignity of owning a domain.

Nostalgia for Web 1.0 does not fully explain this shift, though an element of such sentiment exists. Recognition has grown that platforms are extractive relationships. Posting on Medium, Instagram, or LinkedIn constitutes sharecropping—working land not owned by the creator, subject to rules not written by the user, with no guarantee that work will remain accessible.¹⁵ Publishing on a personal site builds an edifice on controlled ground.

The barriers to entry have never been lower. Services like WordPress, Ghost, and Micro.blog make it trivial to spin up a personal site without technical expertise. Static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo offer even more control for those willing to learn basic web development. The domain registration system—one of the few remaining pieces of decentralized internet infrastructure—ensures that an address remains controlled by the registrant as long as the annual fee is paid.

What emerges from these personal sites is not a replacement for social media but a complement to it—a place where longer thoughts can breathe, where archives remain accessible, where the author rather than the algorithm determines what matters. The personal website is a vivibyte in archaeobytological terms: a living digital artifact that persists through active maintenance, carrying forward the values and voice of its creator without mediation.¹⁶

The IndieWeb movement has provided both the technical standards and the philosophical grounding for this renaissance. Principles like "own your data" and "publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere" offer a framework for participating in the networked conversation without surrendering sovereignty.¹⁷ Tools like Webmentions and Micropub allow personal sites to interact with each other directly, forming a web within the web—one built on reciprocity rather than extraction.

V. Platform Cooperatives and the Third Way

Not everyone wants to maintain their own server or build their own website. For many people, the appeal of platforms was never the corporate ownership but the ease of use—the fact that someone else handled the technical details. This creates space for a third model: platform cooperatives, which combine the usability of corporate platforms with democratic governance and equitable ownership.

Platform cooperatives are owned and controlled by their users rather than outside investors.¹⁸ They distribute profits to members and make decisions through participatory processes. Furthermore, they encode values like privacy and sustainability into their operating agreements. They are not a theoretical possibility but an existing alternative. Examples such as Stocksy (photographer cooperative), Resonate (musician-owned streaming), and Social.coop (cooperatively run Mastodon instance) demonstrate the model's viability.

The platform cooperative movement draws on a long history of cooperative economics, updated for the digital age.¹⁹ Like agricultural cooperatives in the 20th century, they arise when market concentration threatens the livelihoods of producers. Prioritizing member benefit over investor returns, they resemble credit unions. Like worker cooperatives, they reject the premise that those who do the work should not control the enterprise.

What makes platform cooperatives particularly significant in the context of unshittification is that they chart a middle path between individual sovereignty and collective infrastructure. They recognize that some digital spaces function best as shared resources—that not everyone should have to run their own email server or social network—while insisting that those who use and build those spaces should govern them.

The challenge for platform cooperatives is scaling without sacrificing values. The venture capital model offers rapid growth through massive capital infusion, but that capital comes with strings: investors expect exponential returns, which leads to enshittification as the platform seeks ever-larger revenue from its captured user base. Cooperatives must grow more slowly, relying on membership dues, grants, and patient capital from values-aligned funders. This slower growth is both a disadvantage in market competition and an advantage in maintaining mission integrity.

VI. Discord, Newsletters, and the Micro-Community Turn

While some people flee platforms for federation or self-hosting, others have found refuge in what might be called micro-communities—small, bounded spaces that exist within corporate infrastructure but maintain enough autonomy to feel communal.

Discord servers, initially designed for gaming communities, have become a primary venue for everything from book clubs to professional networks or even activist organizing.²⁰ What makes Discord appealing is its boundedness. A server has clear membership and known moderators. Furthermore, norms emerge from the community rather than being imposed by an algorithm. The platform provides the infrastructure, but the community provides the meaning.

Email newsletters, particularly those distributed through independent platforms like Ghost and Buttondown (though not venture-backed alternatives subject to platform dynamics),²¹ represent another form of micro-community formation. Unlike social media posts that disappear into an algorithmic feed, newsletters arrive in subscribers' inboxes—a space protected from corporate intermediation. The subscriber chooses to be there; the author knows who receives the work; the relationship is direct.

These micro-communities are archaeobytologically significant because they demonstrate that digital sovereignty does not require technical sophistication or ideological purity. Most Discord users are not thinking about platform governance when they create a server; they're just trying to find a place where they can talk to people they like without algorithmic interference. Most newsletter writers are not making a political statement about media infrastructure; they're trying to build a direct relationship with readers.

But the cumulative effect of millions of these choices is political. Each Discord server is a small assertion that community formation does not require corporate mediation. Each newsletter is a claim that writers can reach readers without renting shelf space in the attention economy. The sovereignty is distributed, incremental, and often unconscious—but no less real for that.

VII. The Limits of Unshittification

Presenting this movement as already victorious or even certain to succeed would be dishonest. Platforms facing potential exodus still command the attention of billions. Network effects, switching costs, and capital reserves make such entities difficult to dislodge. Most importantly, corporate incumbents have normalized the idea that digital life should be easy. They view friction as a design flaw rather than a feature, leading to the assumption that convenience justifies the forfeiture of sovereignty.

The alternatives described require more from users: more technical knowledge, more active maintenance, more willingness to accept imperfection. The Fediverse is confusing. Personal websites require effort. Platform cooperatives lack the polish of their venture-backed competitors. Discord servers can become insular echo chambers. Email newsletters are a poor substitute for the serendipity of a well-functioning social network.

Digital sovereignty, moreover, remains unequally distributed. Those with technical skills, stable internet access, disposable income, and time to learn new systems possess choices that others lack. Building a website is trivial for those who know how to code; the task is daunting for those working multiple jobs and barely keeping up with platform demands. Unshittification risks becoming a boutique phenomenon—a preserve for the digitally privileged rather than a genuine alternative for the masses.

There is also the question of whether the alternatives will themselves enshittify over time. Bluesky, despite its decentralized architecture, is funded by venture capital.²² Discord is a private corporation that could change its terms of service at any moment. Even the Fediverse instances with the best governance can fail through poor administration or community conflict. The architectural improvements help, but they do not eliminate the underlying dynamics of digital power.

Perhaps most challenging is the recognition that dependence on critiqued platforms often persists. Facebook accounts are kept because family photos reside there. LinkedIn profiles are maintained because professional networks live there. Twitter is checked despite migration to Bluesky because breaking news still appears there first. Switching costs trap critics as well as casual users. Unshittification is not something that happens passively; the process must be chosen repeatedly, at ongoing cost to convenience and connection.

VIII. Archaeobytology and the Philosophy of Digital Ground

To understand what is at stake in the movement toward owned digital spaces, engagement is required with the deeper ontological questions that archaeobytology raises. What does it mean for a digital artifact to have a ground? What are the conditions under which digital presence can persist?

Archaeobytology distinguishes between different states of digital existence based on their relationship to infrastructure and care.²³ A vivibyte is a living digital artifact—one that exists in a functioning ecosystem where it can be accessed, modified, and propagated. An umbrabyte is liminal, existing at the edge of accessibility as its supporting infrastructure decays. A petribyte is frozen, its file intact but the ecosystem needed to interpret it gone. And a nullibyte is lost entirely, leaving only metadata traces to mark its former existence.

Such taxonomy reveals platform dependency as a structural threat. When a digital presence lives exclusively on corporate platforms, it exists in a state of precarity. The platform can change its algorithm, shut down entirely, ban an account, or simply decide that content is not profitable enough to serve. Vivibytes are always at risk of becoming umbrabytes or worse.

In contrast, content residing on controlled infrastructure has a different ontological status. A maintained website is a vivibyte as long as maintenance continues. Even if payment for hosting ceases, the files still exist—they have become umbrabytes, but they retain the possibility of resurrection. The artifact's fate is tied to the owner's choices and capacity, not to the shifting interests of a distant corporation.

This defines digital ground: the substrate on which a presence rests. Platforms offer the illusion of ground—a profile, a handle, a history—but it is rented ground, not owned ground. The platform can evict the user at any time. The lease is perpetually month-to-month.

True ground means: The owner holds the domain. The owner controls the server (or delegates control to a trusted party). The owner possesses the files. The owner determines the terms of access. Such possession does not confer immunity to infrastructure failure—servers crash, hard drives die, domains expire if unpaid. A key distinction remains: the failure is the owner's to prevent or recover from, not a decision made in a boardroom by people unaware of the user's existence.

Movement toward owned castles is thus not about platform politics or user experience. The shift represents an ontological commitment: a refusal to build digital identity on rented land. It recognizes that persistence requires ground, and it accepts the care work that maintaining that ground demands.

IX. The Work Remaining

Examples explored represent meaningful choices—every domain registration, every Discord server, every Mastodon instance signifies a different path. Honesty is required: these are signal fires, not a conquered territory.

The dominant platforms still command most digital attention. The tools for digital sovereignty, while improving, remain less accessible than they should be. The distribution of technical skills, stable infrastructure access, and disposable time creates barriers to participation. Not everyone can unshittify, and those who can do not always have the resources to help others follow.

Even the alternatives require vigilance. Bluesky's venture capital backing creates future incentive misalignments. Fediverse governance is uneven across instances. Discord servers can become toxic without good moderation. Personal websites still depend on domain registrars and hosting providers who have their own agendas.

Work ahead includes: building tools that make sovereignty accessible to non-technical users; advocating for policies that reduce switching costs and protect user rights; teaching digital literacy as civic education; funding open-source projects and cooperative platforms; modeling the digital life intended to flourish; and showing up for the communities performing this work already.

Such effort will take years. Full achievement may never occur. Accepting platform feudalism as the permanent condition of digital life, however, is unacceptable.

The Year of Unshittification is a call to action, not a declaration of victory. Work remains to be done.

X. The Year Ahead

The beginning of 2026 brings cautious hope. The infrastructure for digital sovereignty exists. The communities practicing sovereignty are growing. Critique of platform capitalism has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Experience of betrayal has become common enough that "conditions need not be this way" has become a widespread sentiment rather than a radical proposition.

Construction in the year ahead will depend on millions of individual choices. Examples include paying for a domain, learning enough HTML to maintain a simple site, or joining a cooperative rather than a corporation. Supporting open-source projects with money or labor is another critical action, as is teaching someone else how to own ground. No single choice will transform the digital landscape, but the accumulated weight of these choices can shift the center of gravity.

The Year of Unshittification is not guaranteed. Platform power is entrenched, and the forces of extraction persist. But a viable alternative exists, and people are choosing it. The castles are going up. The gardens are being planted. The ground is being claimed.

The question now is not whether unshittification is possible, but whether it will be enacted. Tools exist. Knowledge is available. The only missing element is collective commitment to do the work. Inconvenience must be accepted, skills acquired, costs paid, and the digital commons intended for habitation finally built.

This is the work of digital archaeology in the Synthetocene: not merely preserving what is being lost, but forging the tools and institutions that make persistence possible. The Archive and the Anvil, working in concert.²⁴

The year ahead demands construction.

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Works Cited

American Dialect Society. "2023 Word of the Year: Enshittification." January 5, 2024. https://www.americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year.

Doctorow, Cory. "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok." Wired, January 23, 2023.

European Federation of Journalists. "EFJ Stops Posting on X." November 20, 2024. https://europeanjournalists.org/efj-stops-posting-on-x/.

Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Oremus, Will. "Bluesky, a Social Network Championed by Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Opens to the Public." Washington Post, February 6, 2024.

Macquarie Dictionary. "2024 Word of the Year: Enshittification." December 2024.

Zittrain, Jonathan. "The Internet Is Rotting." The Atlantic, June 30, 2021.

Mirrlees, Tanner. Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Culture Industry. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016.

Perez, Sarah. "Bluesky Tops 15M Users as People Exit X After the Election." TechCrunch, November 13, 2024.

Rochet, Jean-Charles, and Jean Tirole. "Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets." Journal of the European Economic Association 1, no. 4 (2003): 990–1029.

Scholz, Trebor. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.

———. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016.

Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

Unearth Heritage Foundry. "Archaeobytology." In The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology. 2025. https://unearth.wiki. See also: Vivibyte, Umbrabyte, Petribyte, Nullibyte, Autogravitas, The Archive, The Anvil, The Synthetocene.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

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Footnotes