EGS losing money has been great for gamers, as they continue to give away free games in an attempt to claw any marketshare. Gamers continue to win as long as this situation lasts. But reading these comments, nobody seems to recognize this.

Yes, instead they will discontinue their websites and make you use their app.

I love Brave, use it daily, and this article didn’t convince me at all. Vaguely motioning at the founder’s ancient political donations or the optional crypto features, doesn’t make a strong case.

Your point is the worse product should win? Open source can totally compete on features: we have way more developers than them. With Linux I can have basically any feature I want if I tinker enough. It’s about: what’s the best software for people?

I developed an early VR game called Soundboxing. It was a VR beat game before Beat Saber. It was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on Steam, but Facebook repeatedly denied us access to their store with no explanation, bought Beat Saber, basically took over the industry and shut us out. They even sent us early Quest devkits that we spent 6 months porting to, only to be denied again. I’m super salty about it all tbh. But yeah, this is not that, this I see as an absolute win.

There is an ultimate objective point of view: adoption. Network effects matter for social software. Even if you don’t like things like DRM, micropayments, region locking or whatever, if you don’t build in to the protocol ways to do those things, people and corporations will find ways to do them around the protocol - and that’s where abuse of power and EEE risk happens. Adapt or die. I’ve been around long enough to see this happen many times and know what I’m talking about, so attempting to belittle me by telling me to go read history is kind of pointless. Also Facebook destroyed my startup, literally, so it’s not like I’m some big fan. I just know a positive-sum development when I see one.

In your scenario, Lemmy was worse than Kbin and didn’t suit users needs as well, and didn’t evolve the protocol fast enough to keep up. Kbin deserved to win in that case.

Extension implies that the protocol is missing some capability, otherwise it wouldn’t need to be extended. So we need to make the protocol better so they have nothing to add. If we don’t add those capabilities, ever, then the protocol is doomed to eventual irrelevance and wasn’t worth fighting over anyway.

Again, another thread where two billion people joining our network and meeting us where we are … is somehow bad. If embrace extend extinguish is really the worry, then we have a bad protocol that needs extension to be usable by those 2B people, and we should fix that.

Am I living in a different planet from the rest of the commenters here? We have much more to gain from this than they do.

No, it’ll never go away, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective.