Someone having met Epstein is about as interesting and concerning as having met Theodore McCarrick [1] or Harvey Weinstein [2].
Those kind of people aren't cartoon villains who only meet with people as part of their villainous activities.
The vast majority of people they meet with are for their other activities and interests. Most people meeting with McCarrick for example were meeting for the reasons they would meet with any Archbishop (or priest or bishop, depending on when they met him), or met with him for some other mutual, legal, interest or business reason.
Same with Weinstein. Most people he met would be meeting for the same reason they would meet any producer, or for some other mutual, legal, interest of business reason.
And same with Epstein. Epstein fancied himself as a patron of the sciences and made contact with a lot of scientists over their research and possible funding of their labs. He also fancied himself a philanthropist and had many contacts related to that.
[1] Former Archbishop of Newark and of Washington.
[2] One of the biggest and most successful Hollywood movie producers.
Ever since OpenAI stuck the "Memory almost full" ad banner at the bottom of every chat, I've moved away from them. I have Grok in my car, Alexa+ on my alexas, Gemini Plus from my Google Workspace account, Microsoft Copilot at work, Claude Code because I like it, Opencode because it's free enough -- by spreading my chats around I'm not beholden to any single of them.
None of these can't be moved away from immediately. Even with my github repos, I use Antigravity, Claude Code, Opencode, and I might try Codex. I use one of them as a primary more than the other, but they're as close to interchangeable as possible.
If he'd failed at his endeavors and didn't have a very successful company, that might be interesting insight. Since that didn't happen, it feels like you're fronting with your judgement in spite of its irrelevance to his arc.
Tax is also an economic term, which is not what’s happening. Calling it a “tax on consumers” doesn’t make sense because any data centers buying RAM right now are also buying from the same global market.
If commenters just want to be outraged and throw words around then use whatever words you want, I suppose.
Bluesky isn't my bank records, isn't my photo archive, isn't my github, isn't my Documents folder.
I don't care if Bluesky goes away, gets bought, whatever.
Social media is disposable like a retail outlet. I'm sad if the coffee shop around the corner goes out of business, but there are 99K coffee shops in the US. I can go to another one.
As it is, I don't use Meta or X.. because they're led by despicable beings. Bluesky gets a pass for now, and has enough interesting people that I show up and have a chat. Like a coffee shop or a bar.
I think it's important to separate Bluesky the company from atproto & "the atmosphere", i.e the collection of apps, feeds, labellers, relays, jetstreams, and other participants in the network.
The atmosphere and the PDS are definitely trending towards a single database for all your things. All of the examples you cited are being worked on in one form or another. I'm personally working towards a Permissioned PDS which can power Google Workspace like experience on ATProto, where there is an existing understanding of how sharing, visibility, roles, and permissions work across groups of people (IAM). Permissioned data unlocks an entire (majority) of applications people want to use, but won't until they can do it without broadcasting everything. There are a number of ways this may play out, several will materialize as options, i.e. some apps need e2ee and others cannot have it for the experience they want to deliver.
The overarching ethos is user or individual choice, paired with credible exit, enables real competition. Let's go wild, build all new apps, and let the people decide what they prefer. More indie, less winner take all
Social media should be treated as disposable. Anything that is not yours (as in, is hosted by someone else - for free) should be disposable. In fact id even argue that any media should be treated as disposable. You wouldn't hoard all the material things your accumulate in life, why would you hoard random tweets, comments and reactions forever?
If its worth it, surely you'll find a way to keep it in a way that doesnt demand a third party to do it for you for eternity, no?
"Switching costs" man... people move between countries with vastly different languages and cultures and they adapt, make new relationships, refresh ideas. Is switching from database A to database B that difficult really?
This feels like the healthiest take (other than just opting out of social media entirely). I wish there wasn’t this tension between scale and freedom/diversity. I wish the dynamics of tech were a little less winner-takes-all. But such is the nature of global digital distribution. Decentralization and local-first are nice ideas but they create a pretty high barrier to entry that keeps a lot of interesting people out. If I’m going to be on social media I don’t want to be in a cesspool like Twitter but I also don’t want to be an idealogical hobbyist bubble.
This is totally what atproto offers, see my peer comment to yours, then come back and read this.
I'll add here that there are a bunch of experiments going on which aim to break down apps into features. One example is DMs. Ideally all apps can use the same DM infrastructure (MLS based) and as a users, my DMs are the same in any app as my dedicated messenger app. Many people have had the idea to build a "browser" and any app can use bits of another (leaflet blog publish creates bsky post). Some cool experiments around things that look like web components, where you can create records that express a way to render something.
Another place user vs app choice comes into play is around the graph itself. One of the early dreams of app builders was that there is this existing network and you don't have to bootstrap a social network from scratch. While this is partially true, it does turn out reaching network effect is not so easy. Around this, there is a multi-camp debate on whether apps should reuse social graphs or not, one specific example of this is should an app automatically, upon request, or not at all: start from a user's existing social graph.
This is where I'm at, but it would be nice if it had some more longevity to it, as there are costs to switching to the next thing and the thing after that.
Years and years ago I went to a "Museum of Flight" near San Diego (I think, but not the one in Balboa Park). I joked, after going through the whole thing, that it was more a "Museum of those who died in the earliest days of flying".
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