Dave Lane 
🇳🇿I just hope that people learn one thing from the Twitter debacle (especially those who consider themselves dependent on it): allowing yourself to become dependent on a tool that is centralised, corporate, for-profit, and proprietary is a perfect way to set yourselves up for a similar fall in future. Look for the same pattern in your other tech dependencies. I suspect most of us will feel some discomfort. That's good. It's also appropriate. That's what leads to positive change.
sj_zeroNot just for communication platforms, either. For many many things, if you don't control it, it isn't yours. You might have found the perfect little program for part of your workflow but oops it's an online app from Google and it's now in the Google graveyard. You might have found the perfect free to use 3d tool, but oops they got bought out and now it's $1000 a year to keep using it. You might have found the perfect iot device for your home but oops, it relies on a third party server and the company went out of business so now you have to throw all the equipment you bought away.
@sj_zero absolutely. I wrote this in an effort to help people understand: https://davelane.nz/mshostage
ogbog@sj_zero @[email protected] so you're saying I can get rid of my original kinect, even though it was once long ago the height of homebrew mocap?
Robert M. Kelly@sj_zero @lightweight True. But this is the nature of Capitalist Tech. The current horserace to see who will harness ChatGPT (and ChatGPT-like) tech and make gobs of money from deploying it is instructive. Most all of these firms will fall by the wayside. Two or three will capitalize on the potentialities, and one will get folded into Google. It seems that consumers have no choice but to become the beneficiaries as well as the victims.