In general agreed, but also depends on what the reason you gave on if you are a hypocrite.
IE if you said “I’m not opening this up to Chinese millitary use because I don’t want anyone to be killed using the tool I’ve made”.
on the other hand if your reason given was
“I am not opening this up to chinese millitary because I would fear they might use this against the US millitary”. then you at least aren’t bullshitting anyone.
I’m about to release a not so smart AR Headset. Super light, It won’t generate fake TV screens or give information like the apple vision pro, but it will just be tinted to help bright sunlight be less bright. Still brainstorming what to call this low tech VR/AR technology.
Won’t track your health, Won’t prevent aids. May make you invisible to the seen realm, and draw the attention of unseen beings.
Because growth… Without the R&D money, Microsoft or Yahoo, or someone else would have figured out how to do what they do faster/better, waited until google was a forgotten name and then enshittified.
Public trading… it’s capitalism. By law you have to try and extort every penny.
Quite true… I suppose that’s also the problem of the networks that are focused at privacy/control nerds first, and trying to get more mainstream users second.
The suggested follow is the types of features we are afraid of… The developers came to these places because they don’t want to be told what to do… IE literally that’s the exact problem with twitter right now, is Musk is personally shoving his right wing crap in our faces whether we want to look at it or not. But what regular people want… is to have crap shoved in their faces that they like and agree with.
Which I suppose development of mastadon and the like just hadn’t reached the point, we go at minimum viable, and get what you specifically are looking for… with a lack of excitement for trying to use algorythms to tell people what they like.
Tech so loves to repeat the same loops, and IMO I think it’s on us the fediverse for really failing to communicate the value of instances as well as making them easy.
(Number of people that have told me they think mastadon sounds like a good idea, but they don’t know how to pick the right instance). I try and smack them and say "it’s just like e-mail, you and your friends don’t have to choose gmail, your friend can be on yahoo, and you still talk to eachother. Whcih makes sense when explained, but it seems like few hear that kind of comparison.
So… we have a new platform, to replace twitter… yay!.. should we take counts on how long before either enshittification begins, flooding of ads or changes to be unusable), or it sells out to another already established billionare that abuses the power of media control etc…
I mean, it’s just like e-mail addresses, I really don’t understand the difficulty. Yes technically if I want to e-mail joe smith, I need to know his address, including what mail provider he uses. Which is why when I ask for his e-mail address he tells me “[email protected]”. and not just joesmith.