What they want, they will have. We have no say. Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you." Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah. But s

What they want, they will have. We have no say. Who here remembers: "Stay calm. Breathe. We hear you." Why don't we also have more bots on HN? Oh yeah. But serious question ... why in 2024 do we have our own widely-available tools for Web1 (Wordpress powers 40% of all web sites) and Web3 (all the semi-geeky protocols, like UniSwap, and wallets) but for Web2 we have, uh, Mastodon and Diaspora? Where is the real open source competitor to Facebook, Twitter, et al? Otherwise it's their world and we just all live in it. Just to communicate with your friends. Just to have a platform. You have to put up with whatever they want. And give them all your followers. And content. So they can monetize it and make billions, train their AIs on it then dump you. That's the bargain. And in the meantime they will spy on all their users, try to push advertising and newsfeeds and notifications and bots down their throats, and play their content creators against each other etc. I'd be saying this about huge AI models trained on corporate clusters but Zuck actually spent billions on giving away an open source one (thanks to that fiasco with researchers leaking weights, LLaMa became sort of the Mozilla of AI models). But AI is recent, Web2 is ancient, where are the open alternatives?