South Africa has been the exception.

Well yes, it’s really difficult to switch when government only just managed to migrate to Windows 10 on most machines, and still uses Microsoft’s document formats for everything aside from PDF.

Up until a few years ago, UNISA was still using public-facing IIS servers and SARS was paying up the wazoo to maintain old Flash applets that people used to file their taxes.

One government department managed to waste R5 million on a WordPress website that used a $15 theme.

“He’s out of line, but he’s right.”

macOS? You gotta be kidding. Windows and Office is huge.

Just the entrenchment of Sharepoint and Outlook alone is enough to make switching to anything else a difficult prospect.

Spez has almost never had the gift of foresight.

They probably looked at Facebook’s latest dumpster fire involving hauling data outside of the EU and decided to just not find a workaround.

They don’t want users to be able to wipe their own chats manually or via GDPR requests.

If anyone asks, they will be told that the data is gone, but we all know that’s not the case. They do have backups.

“Off the record” largely implies that an NDA would be involved, considering “confidential information that should not be shared with others.”

Meta’s decision to work towards federation does need to be taken with a lot of salt. Corporations using open platforms or open source to make their money has always resulted in power imbalances that, left unchecked, may become impossible to solve without concessions from said corporation, or else [X] thing just gets hung out to dry.

You have to hope the people running that company understand that these problems exist, and actively work against ruining everything for everyone else that relies on it.

As the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.”

That’s not a realistic proposal if Facebook volunteers dev resources to improve and support ActivityPub and we grow to rely on that. In the same way that Google co-opted the W3C to now just accept Chrome as the default, I can see something similar happen if Threads really kicks off and has a ton of effort put into it.

It’s a lot more grey than you’d expect given the absurd resources that nation states have compiled to try and usurp Google’s dominance, but all the same I’d rather not have the internet rely on something made by a publicly traded company that cuts projects on a whim.

Sometimes I wonder if 4Chan’s model is really the one we should be implementing, somehow. Remove individuality via the profile names and avatars people use to post under, and things seem to largely work themselves out (speaking as an infrequent visitor that has surface-level knowledge of the politics of 4Chan).

Sure, you can do something similar with throwaway accounts on places like Reddit, but it’s not quite the same.

Given the… frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and…

I mean it’s getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve.