Corpo marketing to obfuscate the idea of installing software and nurture dependency to pre-installed proprietary repositories for an entire crowd of dependent non-tech savvy users that doesn’t know what an apk is probably.

I avoid using the term unless I’m being cheeky about “sideloading” from Google Play.

That’s nice, but I feel we need engines with independent indexes and crawlers more than another metasearch engine that just acts as a private middleman to big tech corps.

Hydrofluoric acid

I disagree, Proton is a privacy company with more followers on Mastodon than on Threads and TikTok. Should they also drop what Linux support they have to focus only on Windows because it has a large base? This feels alienating to their privacy conscious users if anything.

A post from the reddit thread on this that led me down a “dark” (double pun in this case) rabbit hole:

Larry Ellison is either independently coming up with, or stealing, an idea from an authoritarian freak named Curtis Yarvin. From an article about his ideology:

Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.

In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”

Yarvin is a thought leader who influences many of the most powerful people in the world (and also a couple elected politicians).

Larry Ellison basically floated the idea of an AI surveillance panopticon several months ago.

Ars Technica: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison

FYI the 41% of instances that block or limit Threads (from the source data which doesn’t have every instance), accounts for 24% of the user base of the fediverse.