Craig #Hockenberry of #Twitterrific has thoughts.

Thoughts on the 🦤 site, and beyond.

https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

Centralization of services is nice in many ways, but it is subject to the users of those centralized services finding themselves and their processes and dependencies beholden to what can become "a $44 billion dollar version of MySpace", as Hockenberry put it.

And if you think this can't or won't happen with other major websites and services and vendors, guess again.

We've all seen a number of vendors and services fade from IT prominence and in other cases wholly disappear, including #IBM, #Microsoft, #DEC, #Compaq, #AltaVista, the #BUNCH, and myriad others.

I do appreciate the idea of unifying multiple information subscription services into one client too, as Hockenberry describes. I've long used RSS feeds and similar mechanisms to maintain access to ever-changing information sources, and rolling all that flow into one client—with ActivityPub and presumably with other common subscription protocols such as RSS—avoids adding dependencies on what can be fickle services providers.

Service provider interest and sponsorship and support of these client efforts will vary. Users avoiding establishing dependencies on services will probably be viewed as devaluing those services, which will make some of the service operators less than happy, and less than willing to invest, of course.

The ever-shifting foundations of IT are all fodder for thought.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/