I don’t want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.
But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger “main” network, and everything in-between.
There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.
I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.
Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.
If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.
I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.
Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.
Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.
JetBrains have some quite extensive VC tooling built into their IDEs which I use almost exclusively. I used to do everything in the terminal, but I find it so much quicker and simpler to do it directly in the IDE.
So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.
Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.
It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.