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.”

Ah, Russian boot-licking.

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.

“We need to be fair in our broadcasting!”

Yes, but you don’t have to platform Nazis.

That’s probably why digital displays still have analog speedometer options. At a glance it’s easier to tell what’s happening with your speed, rev count, and other levels like fuel.

But much of that utility is useful for manuals and ICE-powered cars.

I’ve just deleted Relay. End of an era, but I’m no longer going to use Reddit as much as I used to.

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.

Oh it’s going to be bad. Really bad. Microsoft said over a billion people were using Windows 10 & 11, but the vast majority of those were on machines that already ran Windows 7/8.1 just fine (and may have been upgraded forcefully).

They tried once to limit hardware compatibility as Intel was switching over to 10th gen by giving people a cut-off point where new versions of Windows 10 would not work on hardware older than Intel 8th gen, but it was so poorly received that they walked it back (and did it with Windows 11 instead).

An actual EOL is going to be very tough to pull off because everyone expects their computers to last more than three years now.

That will see more increases over time, especially as Windows 10 EOL approaches.

“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.

My money is on Twitter employees and core engineers.

Oh so that’s what the Spider-Man meme was about. Zuck knew this was coming.

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. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.