@joepie91 This is also why NGOs are able to get away with a lot of the exploitation and abuses they do. The veneer of niceness helps enable it and makes it so much easier to overlook how awful they can be.

@whatanerd Yep. And even just within tech, there are multiple obvious examples:
- Cloudflare can now intercept and spy on half the traffic on the internet because they got popular by being a "nice, nerd-friendly" company
- npm Inc., the notoriously irresponsible and unaccountable steward of the npm registry, now part of Microsoft, gained their power over the ecosystem by being a "nice, community-oriented" company
- GitHub, which made the entire FOSS world dependent on a completely proprietary and centralized system by being a "nice, FOSS-friendly" company
- Plus all the many other unethical tech companies and startups that have been trying to lure in nerds and FOSS folks with shiny blog posts to convince them they're "one of them"
- ... and, in fact, Tailscale (which is now on Hachyderm) is doing the exact same thing, rapidly embedding its proprietary system into the infrastructure of many FOSS projects by being a "nice company"

@joepie91 @whatanerd i dont think tailscale is really comparable to the others
their client is open-source, they employ someone to work on an independent open-source server implementation, and there isn't really a network effect like for npm and github

@leo @whatanerd That doesn't really change my concerns, though. The *core service* is proprietary, as is their infrastructure, which is the actual thing that constitutes their company. A separate open-source server implementation is a side project, one that may be axed at any moment, that doesn't necessarily have the same featureset, and so on.

*All* of the companies I've mentioned had similar things. High-profile FOSS projects meant to demonstrate that they were "a friend of the open-source community", except they actually weren't, and it was just marketing.

In fact, npm was at one point even entirely open-source! But later closed up their registry implementation.

Ultimately, it is about power dynamics. The exact shape of those power dynamics varies from company to company, but "for the 'real first-party' experience you are dependent on Tailscale the company and their proprietary system" is absolutely one such power imbalance.

And ultimately, no company will do *exactly* the same thing as the ones that came before it. It's never exactly identical, it's always "different". That makes it all the more important to recognize the underlying *patterns* instead.

@leo @whatanerd (Also: the reason they seem out-of-place in this list is because they're being listed at the *start* of their marketing process instead of at the end, when all the consequences have already played out, like for the others. They're included specifically because of the conversation about Hachyderm right now.)