Yes and no. It was already rejection at the selection stage back then, but you luckily never had to. You got one from your ISP, or your university, and you just used that. Sure, some techies had their own mail server or so but it's just mail, just use what you got was enough for the vast vast majority of people.
You've got mail!
Honestly? I needed a Gmail account anyways, so I might as well use that. Same hammer-analogy, not going to buy a new one while mine is working.
Wasn't like the US people couldn't have trivially prevented that by actually going to the votes instead of not voting. At some point it's willful on behalf of the people. 🤷
Yeah that's why I'm on Bluesky. Twitter was always just a "check whether company XYZ said something about their servers being down"-place.
And Bluesky has a lot of these companies now. A few government places OTOH are on Mastodon. I have both, but both exclusively in this capacity.
I just loooove how pppl believe that whether something has VC-funding or is federated has any effect at all on how people pick software and systems to use.
I mean, users don't even not care, because "caring vs not caring" assumes that the metric they can care about or not mentally exists in their context for judging a decision. Which it does not. Which is a very important part so many software designers of user-facing software forget, to users a short-form posting instance is a tool. A hammer. You use the one you got. Once it becomes defunct, you get a new one. You pick one that all your friends use, because hey, must be great if everyone uses it. Does it have some downsides? Maybe, but frankly it's a hammer who cares?!
I tried to join Beehaw simply because a reddit community I was actively part in went there.
I got told that's not a valid reason to join, and that further applications from me would be ignored. I mean... okay? Sure... guess I'm no longer part of that community.
Which AFAIK isn't a standard, so... 🤷
Probably not. Currently it seems on track that you're always first on their main instance. If you're technically inclined you could then start hosting a federated part yourself (or joining one), but this does not change that the actual entry experience is exactly the same as on Twitter, hence why transition is so insanely smooth and painless.
People who genuinely think like this (as in, that users going to Bluesky is somehow bad, surprising or something only stupid people do) are the very reason systems such as Mastodon cannot work. And sadly they naturally pervade such systems, at a development, administration and user level.
I’ve seen criticism about these laws holding back AI companies’ development
These laws can't do anything these grifter-companies full of misguided attempts to mis-use LLMs and LAMs aren't doing to themselves already, tbh.
It's all just a huge bubble of C-suites blowing hot smoke up each other's arses.
I mean even if it repeats "the Twitter mistake" that'd still be another 13-14 years to go. Who knows where short-form social media will be conceptually in that time and whether any competition in the space is even still relevant.