Because the goal was to ban third party apps and they don't want people trying to dodge it. u/spez seems to be personally offended by their existence and wants them gone.

Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it's why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.

I figured I'll write up a tldr on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in case you aren't really feeling reading the articles.

Embrace: Meta builds a federated Twitter/Reddit alternative, potentially called Threads but is right now P92, that follows the ActivityPub standard almost perfectly. Various Lemmy and KBin instances federate with them and share information. Users from Facebook and Instagram flood into P92, making it one of the largest instances.

Extend: P92 starts adding nice, but proprietary features to their system. The allure of these features begins drawing users off of other instances to P92. Those instances are upset, but Meta insists it's doing nothing wrong, continues to follow the ActivityPub standard in some form, and tells the other instances to just implement the features themselves.

Extinguish: Meta announces that due to incompatibility, they are withdrawing from the standard and defederating from everyone. Most users of this software are now on P92, and thus don't mind. Meta gets a fully populated Twitter/Reddit alternative, and the remaining ActivityPub instances wither. Without user support, the standard fails, and a new open source alternative is created to replace it.

That strategy has been used to kill other open source protocols, and many people are worried it will happen again. My personal opinion is that servers should only federate with Meta if they follow the standard perfectly, and if they deviate even a little bit they should be universally defederated via software changes, but I'm sympathetic to the people that would rather be proactive than reactive.

The Verge's coverage of this so far has been really good. It's probably because they think drama like this will get a lot of clicks, but even still I've enjoyed their articles.

I like it when various programs at least ask before invasively scraping my data. If asked, I'll often say yes because I want to help the developers, but when it's silent and in the background I have no control and I don't like that

It's mentioned in the comment section that the developer made /c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.world as the community for the new project.

Yeah it's been inconvenient to Google stuff and have private subreddits come up, but that's life. Hopefully that information will begin moving to Lemmy instances as time goes on.

I've always hated that original meme. This is honestly much closer to the truth. The thing about hard times, is they don't lead to "strong" men, historically they've led to thousands of years of misery. Likewise, good times oftentimes lead to academic and institutional strength that can also perpetuate itself, which is the whole idea behind a "golden age."

I also use Bing. I like the AI features and the rewards program. The results are meh in terms of quality, but at this point honestly so are Google's.