I think that's a fair distinction, and it highlights that "just publish the protocol" isn't sufficient for every class of device

At the same time, consumer hardware isn't a niche hobby market

Linux is not a niche hobby OS.

Nobody expects lifetime support, but killing basic functionality because an app backend or roadmap disappeared is hard to justify, especially when the device still works electrically and mechanically

Where the framing still resonates for me is in who controls the boundaries

That comparison feels uncomfortably accurate

Once you see social media as an attention-extraction machine rather than a communication system, outsourcing creation to users starts to look like a temporary optimization, not the end state

Every generation experiences the current downgrade as catastrophic, only to later discover it was already a compromise layered on top of an earlier one

I think, at a minimum, a return to print or radio news is called for. They necessitate attentive consumption of information in a way that video just doesn't. I feel like they leave mental space open for critical thought. TikTok is the total opposite.

I don't know how bad TikTok is because shorts just don't grab hold of me hard enough to even look at the app, at most I see someone else sharing a short of something silly on a meme channel.

But… and I appreciate you did say "at a minimum"…

Radio is absolutely something you can have on in the background, vibrating your eardrums without engaging your attention.

Intentionality may be impossible in TikTok for all I know, but it isn't enough to just do radio, and I think also not print.

So if we try to walk up all the ladders of abstractions and get to the core where we cannot go yet another layer above, what we end up? Word of mouth basically?

What resonated for me is the framing shift: not "centralized vs decentralized," but communication vs consumption

This feels like the internet doing the thing it was supposed to do, not the thing it currently gets most of the attention for

I like how you put it: uncovering rather than creating