https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plutocracy

Capitalism is at odds with democracy itself.

Although, Elon could build one himself. If he does, I just hope if he uses exclusively his tesla factories, I’m sure there won’t be any flaws in the production that way right…

It’s the thought that counts, right?

And Jellyfin has third party music player apps for android and IOS.

Jellyfin’s the way to go IMO, screw Plex and their constant BS.

MIT≠FOS

GNU is Free and forever free software… MIT not so much.

https://fossbytes.com/open-sources-license-type/

Point being, any forks of GNU will have a free version available, MIT carries no such limitation… making it a corpo favorite.

You can call it open source, but Free and Open source is questionable.

Any “Decentralized” Solution that is not F.O.S. free and opensource was never “Decentralized” at all.

When your platform advertises itself as decentralized, and a simple “host bluesky instance” search results in articles telling you to join the main instance’s waiting list… that sounds too stupid for me to give them the time of day.

I am surprised anyone uses or takes them seriously.

This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as “not spam” whenever it showed up in the spam folder.

True, if they integrate with federation in good faith it won’t matter that much for those not using them. But until we see what they do I won’t hold my breath on Facebook doing something in good faith.

This is true, and line is king in Japan and yet I believe the most common third party messenger app in the US is Facebook messenger despite its obvious flaws. Why, because it has more features than sms, and most people already have an account.

No matter which way you slice it, companies that can profit off communication will try to wall off their market share. Which is one of the things the fediverse aims to cure.

True, but if GDPR has taught us anything… smaller firms will bend over backwards to comply and the largest ones will make cutouts, bend the rules and treat fines like fees to play. I think having the law in the US would be the best way to protect US citizens. In addition, I think it would be able to have more teeth being the country where a lot of these companies were founded and most importantly where they bank.

Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a “privacy bill of rights” and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.

Won’t happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read [email protected] for a little bit and come back.

Important not from that article:

It’s not the first time we’ve seen big tech companies attempt to trademark common terms or goods. However, a study by the Tech Transparency Project found that Apple filed more trademark oppositions over a three-year period than Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook combined.

If you think trademarking of common terms is a bad thing at all, apple seems to be the worst among big tech firms.

P.S. this “Android Authority” article put apple in the correct light in my opinion after reading it, and I use a lot of Apple products.

It isn’t even their logo, they are trying to copyright images of apples.

“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz was quoted as saying by the outlet. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal… that should be free for everyone to use.”

Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more… and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.

The features don’t have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.

I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.

What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.

Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.

I personally prefer namecheap and cloud flare for domains. I often route stuff through cloudflare anyway so if they have the tld I want I will just purchase from them.

In related news, Elon Musk has been adamant about ending remote work, but that’s likely to be difficult without, you know, office space.