What does “enshittification” mean? How is it caused?

Basically, it can happen when one company (or a few companies) dominates a market, so they can gradually make shit worse for everyone, trying to make just a bit more money.

Federation is the solution. As long as there are many servers, run by different owners and administrators, any single server can only fuck itself over.

That is why the open source community likes protocols, interoperability, APIs, and federation. No single software package, or server, should control the entire market. Single-point failure means brittle architecture, whether through accident or intent.

Is it common? How would we know? By investigating.

Come on, quit thinking abstractly and use reality as a test. Trump has been looking for those fake voters for a decade. A decade! He didn’t find any… Why is that? Not because of your master plan, my friend. But because voter fraud is just not happening on a measurable scale… Or, to put it differently, are you smarter than state election officials and the DoJ? And even if one of you is, scale that up. How many people are as magical as you?

Well look. Obviously there are security issues. JavaScript has its own share, PHP has an extra large share. The question has always been when the commercial businesses will decide that they need to fund the open source projects they rely on.

This depends on the laws of the country in which you reside. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t sign something unless you know exactly what it says and you agree to it. If you don’t speak the local language then you could either get a translator or a lawyer or both.

But in some countries there are protections for people who don’t speak the local language well. For example, in Japan, there’s an expectation that employers, and especially larger employers, will make relevant paperwork available in the employee’s native language. And if they don’t do so, they can end up losing in court, and this has happened many times in the past.

Of course, even if you’re in a country where the law partly backs you, it’s still ideal to confirm things as best you possibly can. You don’t want to get screwed first, and then have to hire a lawyer and go to court. If that happens then that’s what you do, but if you have a better option up front, take it.