There's more on this from 'moxie
Then again, this was never the case in the EU, where bundling handsets with a GSM subscription was banned.
But yes, we don’t have to imagine - and the change certainly didn’t come out of the goodness of the carrier’s hearts!
It is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#European_Union
Last time I was looking for a phone (~8 years ago), in France, I had to check which ones were simlocked.
And while the second option does lock you into one operator for 12-24 months you still had the choice of which operator to tie yourself to, I don't think I ever saw a phone model only available on single provider.
Finally no matter which operator you chose you can still call people from other operators, even if they initially tried very hard to make this less pleasurable by allowing free texts and minutes within the operator.
Many things replaced Usenet. Usenet is more of a protocol (that uses NNTP) than a social media platform. If you're any way a systems thinker, you would know that protocols are more resilient than services.
* To be clear, I'm rather ok with piracy. NNTP is just really poorly suited for it.
That is a nice insight.
Yes, this is a problem you also see with the Fediverse (based on W3C ActivityPub). You get innovators and laggers, and the latter when they are popular can hold the former back (you see this with Mastodon, which as early adopter created their own client API's, but are now lagging to implement the Client-to-Server part of the AP specification).
At the same time standardization of federated protocols can also be an advantage in that it allows many different projects and applications [0] to be developed and mature independently. Innovation can come from unexpected corners here (heads up to openEngiadina with ERIS [1], DREAM [2] and Spritely [3] project).
[0] https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
[1] https://gitlab.com/openengiadina/eris/-/blob/main/doc/eris.a...
There are 2 kinds of ActivityPub servers.
- The "dumb" one, that does minimal processing and simply stores JSON objects. Someone POSTs an activity to its inbox, the server does minimal required verification, stores it, and the client then queries it with GET. And does the reverse for the outbox. That's it. That's where c2s would work fine.
- The "smart" one, that treats s2s ActivityPub like an API, comes with a built-in web interface, and stores everything in a way which makes sense for its particular presentation. That's the kind I'm making (Smithereen, it's on the list you linked, btw), and that's what Mastodon is. Implementing c2s in this kind of server is a major pain in the ass, and I won't. You'd have to throw away all your careful optimizations, synthesize ActivityPub objects out of things that never were ActivityPub objects in the first place, do horribly inefficient things to merge notifications and feed and other conceptually unrelated stuff from several different database tables just for the client to split them back apart... Doesn't make much sense. A domain-specific API is the only way to make a client for this kind of server.
As with, say, LaTeX, or Unix/Linux.
According to Wikipedia, Reddit was created the same year Usenet service was discontinued by AOL. Reddit "replaced" Usenet in the same sense that cell phones "replaced" telegrams.
They discontinued the service when Usenet was no longer a selling point, because they had destroyed it.
>>> So while it’s nice that I’m able to host my own email, that’s also the reason why my email isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and probably never will be. By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update.