The main goal of the web4 movement is to combat enshittification and avoid getting into a position where a company is able to keep you or your friends as hostages on their service, forcing you and your surroundings to stay. Depending on your background there are several things you can do to help. We wrote this page to act as a starting point.

I'm not a developer - how can I help?

The most important thing you can do is to use services that are federated. This is the hard part. There are many reasons why jumping ship is painful: You will lose contact with friends and communities you identify with. You will also lose access to what is probably a feed of content tailored to you over years using both manual follows as well as machine learning. This is exactly what siloed services want. To a certain degree you have to sacrifice some convenience in the short run in order to benefit in the long run.

Consider this to lessen the blow: You do not have to quit cold turkey. Consider visiting non-federated sites less while you slowly find your space in the federated world. This will not happen overnight, and we often see people give up too soon. We are not telling you to give up your friends and entertainment and move to a place with nothing of interest. The best way to transition is to make accounts and changing habits to prefer using defederated alternatives. After a while, you can try uninstalling non-federated apps/muting notifications and checking them less often.

Other than using federated services, the best thing you can do is inform those around you about the green pastures on the other side of the fence (or silo, as we call it in the industry) and help them get started.

I'm a developer - how can I help?

We recommend reading The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, by Cory Doctorow. If you aren't able to buy the book or just not interested in reading, there is also a DEFCON talk by the same guy. The main takeaway is that interoperability is the best tool to stop enshittification and siloed services that aim to force unhappy users to stay.

Doctorow argues that reverse engineered interoperability is the best kind of interoperability, because it allows for competition to give users ways of moving over from existing services they use, regardless of whether or not the owner likes it. Today, depending on where you live, it is protected by several laws that when combined make it extremely hard to perform reverse engineering without it being a criminal act. While there are organizations working to revert at least some of these laws (or at least amend them in ways that give consumers more rights), building tools that interact with third-party code is risky. We won't recommend trying it, or at least not under your real name.

What we will recommend is looking for things that don't exist, and making them a thing while keeping interoperability in mind. You are a developer, you can make things on a computer a reality. You literally just have to put your mind to it.

Contributing to OSS projects that support interoperability is also a great way to help. Let's make free, OSS tools that consider interoperability a first-class feature the obvious tool for the job!