I wouldn't give them any credit for that. I would sure bet you that they just decided that building USB-C iPhones for Europe and Lightning for everywhere else would be more expensive than what they ended up doing.
Exactly what Google was trying to enforce with their mandatory developer verification/app signing until they backed down. Hopefully that lasts for a while, but the future of open computing isn't bright...
If by "enshitification" you mean things like invasive ads, invasions of privacy, etc, then the idea is absolutely that making money through a paid tier can stave off the company having to resort to those means.
I mean, it's kind of silly to lock it behind Discord, but just forcing admits to have a Discord account isn't that egregious. You're not forced to use it outside of communicating with Bluesky admins (or whatever goes on in that server).
I think it's a big mistake to think that because the most basic LLMs are just autocompletes, or that because LLMs can hallucinate, that what big LLMs do doesn't constitute "thinking". No, GPT4 isn't conscious, but it very clearly "thinks".
It's started to feel to me like current AIs are reasonable recreations of parts of our minds. It's like they're our ability to visualize, to verbalize, and to an extent, to reason (at least the way we intuitively reason, not formally), but separared from the "rest" of our thought processes.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn't give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you'd care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I wouldn't give them any credit for that. I would sure bet you that they just decided that building USB-C iPhones for Europe and Lightning for everywhere else would be more expensive than what they ended up doing.