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by newlog 1095 days ago
I came here just to share my appreciation to the writing. You beat me.

What a wonderful read. Very insightful. I had already read about this strategy before, but the way it is explained, the first-hand examples, and the depiction of what the true goals of decentralized networks should be is extremely clear and insightful.

It's very counter-intuitive to understand how adoption can go against the success of a software project, and it's also very easy to think that adoption is the goal, when in reality, maintaining (or organically evolving) the ethos of the software is the actual goal.

I wish I knew more people interested in reading what this writing talks about.

1 comments

Yes. There are those who have read up on the history of what 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' means and that the methods are different over the years and cleverly hidden by companies like Google, Meta and especially Microsoft but the strategy has always been the same.

That applies here in this case. But unfortunately, you have Mastodon cheerleaders here who are asking for 'adoption' without knowing the trade-off of instance centralization and continue to blindly accept companies like Meta as a win for 'adoption'; unbeknownst to them signing up and bound to NDAs and getting themselves extinguished as Threads will add more features unavailable on many instances and then it becomes the biggest ActivityPub-compatible network that the users will use.

The warning from this article is totally accurate and Meta is already winning before many techies here have started to realize this.