fediblock, long-ish
Heads-up: an official Microsoft account has appeared at https://dotnet.social/@dotnet
Microsoft has a long and continuing(!) history of "embrace, extend, extinguish", ie. taking over the control and governance of community projects while pretending to be contributing to them out of the good of their hearts.
This strategy is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish -- although nowadays variations of this strategy are also used.
Some recent examples of problematic behaviour from Microsoft:
- WSL, which aims to draw developers away from Linux to re-establish their OS monopoly through a one-way 'compatibility layer'
- Their huge investment into OpenAI and its exploitative AI model
- Their monopoly over the FOSS community through Github, a proprietary platform
- Less well-known, Microsoft's previous venture in "exploiting the public commons for AI stuff" actually predates OpenAI; https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/intellicode/issues/201
Consider blocking accordingly. #FediBlock
fediblock, long-ish
@joepie91 weird. The ~~profile~~ instance description says ".NET Community on Mastodon; not affiliated with Microsoft" but there's a post that says "Hi, we're the .NET Community Team at Microsoft."
EDIT: the instance is not run by MS, but the account is.
re: fediblock, long-ish
@mburtonkelly The "not affiliated with Microsoft" is actually the instance description, not the profile text; the profile text of the account *does* confirm it as official. The instance itself seems to be community-run, for some value of "community-run" anyway.
re: fediblock, long-ish
@joepie91 you're right, I can't read. Updated my post.