4. As others have pointed out, how does shutting them out completely stay in keeping with fediverse principles? This is legitimate question since, to me, it seems like despite the risks, it's antithetical to the spirit of the fediverse until they demonstrate bad behavior here.

how much bad behavior do you want to see before accepting that MetaZuck is evil and has no go intentions?

There's a literal trail of dead startups and bodies.

It's not that they might do something better.

It's that they have a history of encouraging the competition to adopt an open standard (to gain the active users), and then purposely scuttling the standard in order to sink the competition (and leave the users with no functioning alternative).

this was an excellent article. I'm old enough to remember being impacted by these events.

I'm not in Munich, but I remember trying to embrace OpenOffice, and telling my wife how pissed off I was that Microsoft wasn't following it's own open source document standard.

I remember Google killing XMPP, and there's also the more recent examples of what Facebook has done to WhatApp, Instagram, and the other potential competitors that got buried.

well shoot. this sums it up so well, there's nothing to add.

The definition of "reasonable ads" and "just a few ads" keeps sliding. I'm old enough to remember the early internet, and that this lie has been told many times.

Just a few acceptable ads always becomes many unacceptable ads, because money.

oof, this comic hurts so bad it's funny.

hol' up, comparing their reading comprehension to that of a carrot is an unfair insult to the average carrot.

and how exactly is the comparison? is it one carrot per person, or can a single carrot out-comprehend the whole lot?