If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. But let’s pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. We can and should have sane centralized services, of course, but it’s imperative that we also build decentralized services which empower users and give them control, rather than treating them like digital sharecroppers. Yeah, it’s more work, it’s not “free” (sorry not sorry), but I have some uncomfortable news for you: those so-called “free” services aren’t really free. I take a rather Tron-like view of the world when it comes to this stuff; in the software industry, our goal should be to empower users (with strong moderation tools), not exploit them.