He is such a fuckin loser.

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That was so goddamn cool at the time. The whole install experience.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/G9oIlXuaa3s?si=2wosEwp-_iZS3I7V

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.

What’s wrong with Mastodon? It’s already established.

Closed source? Cringe.

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Elon got the idea from China’s WeChat. Elon loves him some despots.

It’s not just the data, it’s also about getting a cut of any monetary interactions, essentially the Visa/MasterCard model. The company holding the “everything” app for a given region has an incredible potential to earn money.

Wanting to be the master of data when Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta exist is cute :)

Wether it’s centralised isn’t really the main issue with these platforms. It’s their For-profit nature. Running a social platform in a for profit manner, is incredibly hard to do - only one company has been known to succeed, YouTube… and they stopped reporting their earnings in 2015, so no one can tell if it’s still profitable or not.

If you are a not for profit company trying to create a social platform, you’ve got more of a chance of it working. However if you’re not for profit doing this, you need to release the soource code. That way if you decide to restructure into a for profit entity we can fork it and save said platform.

Decentralization is the result of the requirements of financing large userbase not for profit platforms in a sustainable way - it actively spreads the cost load across multiple not for profit servers. Allowing donations to be the income driver of the platform right from the beginning. Being not for profit requires that you only ever aim to cover the costs of running the servers - it doesn’t require you to offer any additional services in order to increase revenue, or systems in order to lock people in.

The fact that the data is spread across this server network, inherently making data breaches worth somewhat less than a megalithic platform is literally just an unintended side benefit, despite the fact it’s a little bit mitigated as a result of caching requirements.

The thing is, a for-profit platform can look at this financing model and try to twist it to their moneymaking advantage - just look at bluesky. It gets nonprofits to host services, while keeping a tight grip on the algorithms, by providing a library of them to “choose” - the source code is closed, as a result it’s nearly impossible to tell if these servers are reporting analytics and data back to the central service (covered by the centralised algorithm provider and sign up system) for data collection and data sales.

A decentralized platform like that, allows the company to offload hosting costs by taking advantage of independent nonprofits, while also getting to make a huge profit by selling a fucktonne of data mined from these servers.

Also it removes the need for advertising providers be on the platform, which is a benifit not only because people don’t like ads, but also because advertising companies are fickle and very hard to meet their brand safety demands and retain them. Advertising revenue is rarely stable or reliable.

I don’t want to do everything with this app or any app. An everything app means monopoly and manipulation.

Reminds me on the 2000 https://www.zombo.com/ joke

At the moment it’s just reskinned twitter, eventually he wants to turn it into Facebook with chat, calls, payments and such I guess.

It’s gonna be like yahoo.com circa 2012. Stocks, banks, messaging, email, news etc.

I think a lot of people hear “everything app” and it sounds kind of magical but this is actually a specific category of app already, and it mostly means Payments App+ Restaurant and Convenience Delivery App + Rideshare App.

An example is Careem, which serves the Dubai market only.

You’re totally correct that X is not one of these Apps. Even by this more constrained definition.

Uber is already 2/3 of the way to this in a dominant way with Uber and Uber Eats in one app. Both of those work very well and have already for years. Adding personal payments would probably mean lights out for anyone else with foolish “everything app” ambitions.

Musk is 0/3 of the way there. The ONLY thing he has has to work with is an installed base of users. A large number of people have this app on their phone and have an account. That is something. But he still has to create, well, everything to have an “everything” app, which, as I’ve already covered above, won’t do everything.

The installed base of logged in users is also less valuable than you might imagine because to do payments and delivery is also going to require everyone to enter bank info and home address and those are big asks just in terms of user effort but also privacy.

So good fucking luck, Elon. Being a media company driven by ads sucks and I don’t blame him for wanting out but he’s chosen the most expensive possible path to becoming Careem that I could imagine. I’m just a tech middle manager but I could have given him better corp strategy advice than this.

yet?

It will come with 3 seashells.

You need to use your phone with the app open for that service.