Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!

where it positioned itself as a promising alternative to CDs.

Well, to cassettes actually... or both.

the only feature I look in monitors these days

Not being smart.

Well if you see ActivityPub as the standard way of using decentralized social media...

Define cheap.
Define better.
Define good.

I see a lot of comparisons to China's great wall but i'd wager North Korea is way ahead on that...

It's not that they can't, it's that they won't.

And rightly so! Save the Llamas!

nobody has cracked the code to L5 automation.

especially if you remove LIDAR.

Now i cannot unsee it.

The other edge of the sword: it's now virtually impossible to run your own mail server. POP3, IMAP etc are all open protocols used as the base for email (a common analogy for the fediverse as it too is federated). Then Big Tech came up with DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc to save us from spam^1^ when in fact it's just a fancy form of embrace-extend-extinguish.

The same can happen to the fediverse.

^1^ if it was weakening of cryptografy it'd be think of the children

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a must-read.

They tried something similar in Munich, i think, dropping M$ and going full Debian. A few years later they reversed that 'cos the lusers couldn't handle it.