Yeah this pretty much. Why would I drive a car? it’s a huge waste of money for absolutely no benefit to my life.

I’ve considered learning/getting my licence just to have it “just in case”, that way at least if that once every few years thing comes up where I absolutely need a car and a taxi just won’t cut it, I can hire one or something? but it’s just kind of not come up yet.

My Xperia 10 III has it up top. Damaged more than one cable by just jamming it in my pocket upside-down then realising the cable’s getting smushed up. Note to self: Get headphones with 90 degree cable connectors

And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out

The network effect can be strong. Say you’re now able to contact all your friends via your favourite Activitypub instance, you had to previously use Facebook.com or Threads or whatever but now they’re all here. You delete your Facebook and keep your Activitypub account to speak to all your friends who are on Threads.

Now Meta pulls the federation plug, or adds some feature that makes your Activitypub server not able to fully cooperate (Maybe you can talk, but you can’t video call anymore, or you can’t post GIF/images, whatever). Now what? All your friends are over there and getting annoyed with you. So… you eventually succumb and fire up a Threads account.

I guess I’m misunderstanding here - I thought Whatsapp would be the “service” in my case, I’m just making a client to hook into their, presumably open [to people who agree to whatever their terms are] API. So it’s more of a federation thing between services?

So I [in theory, I don’t know how to start with this on a technical level] could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal? Even if I can’t use my Signal account to contact Whatsapp people, that’s still potentially useful. Although I imagine the terms I’d have to agree to to do so would be full of nonsense that stops this being remotely feasible.

They’re “self driving” in the worst possible way - they can run off on their own and do whatever they want, and have little understanding of the rules of the road. People already freak out when a robotaxi takes an inadvertent wrong turn, horses can freak out and try to kill pedestrians.

Ah yes because no one has ever “”“accidentally lost control”“” of their car and smashed something/someone to pieces with it!

I’d take the mounds of horse shit on the streets over the disgusting stench of cars any day. At least I can scoop some up and spread it on my garden.