this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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I suppose this doesn't feel weird to anyone who lives in China. They have a Whatsapp -clone called Wechat, and it's pretty much exactly what Musk wants X to be able to be.
Which indeed should scare you.
WeChat's API is way more accessible than the nightmare X is, with its current state there's no way to reach that massive adoption. I'd argue that even Telegram has a higher chance than X for such a superapp position given the steps they've taken.
I live in Russia, have used VK before Telegram became a thing, and the thought of a company owned by Durov with that much power scares me shitless.
I can't even describe that feeling, emotionally it's something similar to combination of Saint-Petersburg (I hate that city), Russian-speaking Web (like 4chan gone respectable) and the more elitist layer of Russian university youth (just somehow reptilian and unpleasant and untrustworthy, while not being quite as bright as they themselves may think).
I mean, reading what people say about TG's protocol may give you some idea as to why TG is bad. Also its desktop client source is open, looking at that is also, eh, an unpleasant experience.
My personal opinion is that any app getting a similar dominance to WeChat worldwide is a scary as fuck thing, and should not ever happen.
However, from a developer's perspective; ease of access to development tools is crucial to reach that kind of adoption to the point where other companies are writing software to work with your platform. Telegram provides lots of these things pretty well, and it wouldn't surprise me for them to become a superapp in the future, as opposed to X where it's pretty much impossible.
Though worldwide laws and regulations are quite a hard hurdle for any app to beat in the first place. We're currently seeing the example of "even one of the richest blokes in the world could pour all their money to make such a dominant app and it wouldnt work" after all.
Elon has explicitly said he wanted twitter to become wechat.
Will that include the social credit score?
Only for people that are against free speech like those that disagree with him.
It feels like one of these work hand in hand with regulatory bodies/government, while the other take every possible occasion to shit on regulatory bodies and governments.