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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jul 02, 2023

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Seems like a good time to remind everyone just a few months ago he took two active usernames from their users without warning. Both @x and @music were in use and taken by Musk with no warning and no recompense.

At this rate I see it as completely possible that someone buys one, and the first time they don’t update within whatever Musk feels like is “too long” that day, he takes it back with no warning.


The fear is a practice called “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” (or EEE). It’s been used by tech companies before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

It, in theory, could work like this:

  1. Meta embraces ActivityPub in its tech in an attempt to garner good will and make it easy for users to transition to Threads.

  2. Meta extends on ActivityPub by saying "oh we’re just adding a few things that make this better for our users (on our service) but we’re still supporting ActivityPub!

  3. Meta then extinguishes ActivityPub support, and severally hobbles AP, after they secure enough users to be happy and think AP offers no real competition anymore.

Then the enshittification process begins, by moving the focus from users to other interests (usually advertisers) at the expense of users. And eventually to the platform owners, at the expense of advertisers. Though I guess they’ll skip the middle step, being a public company?

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/


I would be curious about the feasibility of a “performance mode” that was basically “reboot you into a “single program” mode”. I assume it would be unreasonable given so much software relies on the tools modern OSes provide, unless the software itself was made with this in mind.

You’d imagine some giant like Adobe would figure out a way to run dedicated machines, given they have so much software that uses lots of resources. But then, as best as I would find it for games, I imagine most people don’t want to give up alt-tabbing to their web browsers.

Edit: Besides. The real benefits would hit until you were coding to the metal anyway, right? Assuming that’s still feasible too.