Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.
Microsoft is an abusive ex. It will keep abusing you because it knows no other way. You can waste your days trying to fight against it, trying to figure out how to disable and remove whatever new privacy invasive anti-consumer bloat Microsoft decides to roll out that Tuesday.
Or you can leave and switch to Linux and waste time there instead. Tux is all about that respect and is handsome to boot. He might be a bit sensitive and break down rarely so you might need to spare a few to make sure he's ok, but it's nothing a little love can't handle. And he's only going to get better and stronger as he grows. You might even look forward to receiving updates (wow, I know). A stark contrast from your abusive ex.
I don't care how big .world gets because it's the same thing with mastodon.social or pixelfed.social. Coming from primarily centralized services, people will always be looking for a "main" instance because that's what their brains are used to and that's what will help adoption. The ones who care will use another instance. As long as fedi has the users and not the proprietary alternatives, it's fine. We can manage.
World's most popular search engine, video platform, mobile OS, browser engine, email provider, map provider, shall I go on? Search results at this point are just becoming an astrix.
They're trying to suck up and present as much data as possible so people never have to leave Google's services. They want to be the internet. If you enabled people to be independent, private, decentralized, and open, then Google would be in trouble because suddenly individuals and communities would have all the power and data, not some corp that's hellbent on wasting your lifespan and brain space with ads or whatever other garbage decision they make on Tuesday to make their line go up.
There's a pattern of belief among the rich and powerful that is basically like, "people don't actually know what they want. They think they do but what they actually want is different, even if they don't recognize it." When they say "this is what you want" they think they're giving us the thing we actually want. They believe what they're saying.
I find that to be equal parts fascinating and terrifying.