“We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them,” Elon Musk wrote on X, responding to the temporary ban of at least 8 accounts, including those of a handful of journalists.
“We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them,” Elon Musk wrote on X, responding to the temporary ban of at least 8 accounts, including those of a handful of journalists.
That’s how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of “we want something good” and “something good cannot be constructed” that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of “any competitor company will get destroyed” eventually produced a competitor that wasn’t a company.
I think that’s what’s happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn’t ignore the godawfulness, and now look what’s happening. It’s not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great “products” as such; mostly, people just want something that’s not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that’ll be a lot harder to kill or control.
It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.
Linux also only has a 15% market share if you include servers, while Twitter was the place for journalists to give up-to-the-minute updates. It’s going to be difficult to get people to get away from that, just as it’s difficult to get people to stop using Windows.
That’s not exactly what I was saying… Linux powers 70% of the cell phones in the world, 96% of the top 1,000,000 web sites, and literally all of the world’s supercomputers.
I’m not saying your 15% number is wrong, just that including end-user desktops in the “market share” misses the mark of what I meant when I was talking about serious computing. I wasn’t talking about trying to replace Windows as an end-user system of choice. Windows arguably still does a better job than Linux does at that, just as fediverse may never replace Tiktok. I was talking about suppressing competition within a different badly-needed niche creating a more resistant competitor in the long run.