For thousands of years the ruling class has tolerated the rest of us because they needed us for labor and protection. We’re approaching the first time in human history where this may no longer be the case. If any of us are invited to the AI utopia, I suspect it will only be to worship those who control it. I’m not sure what utility we’ll have to offer beyond that. I doubt they’ll keep us around just to collect UBI checks.

• Cloud providers have financial incentive to push microservice architectures
• Cloud providers give corporate consultants statistics like “microservice architectures are proven to be X% more likely to succeed than monolithic architectures”
• Cloud providers offer subscription-based tools and seminars to help companies transition to microservice architectures
• Companies invest in these tools and seminars and mandate that all new projects adopt microservice architectures

This is how it went down with Agile at my company 10 years ago, and some process certifications and database technologies before that. Based on what I’m hearing from upper management microservice are probably next.

From my perspective the corporate obsession with microservices is a natural evolution from their ongoing obsession with Agile. One of the biggest consequences of Agile adoption I’ve seen has been the expectation of working prototypes within the first few months of development, even for large projects. For architects this could mean honing in on solutions in weeks that we would have had months to settle on in the past. Microservices are attractive in this context because they buy us flexibility without holding up development. Once we’ve identified the services that we’ll need, we can get scrum teams off and running on those services while working alongside them to figure out how they all fit together. Few other architectures give us that kind of flexibility.

All this is to say that if your current silver bullet introduces a unique set of problems, you shouldn’t be surprised if the solutions to those problems start to also look like silver bullets.

It’s certainly possible that Meta has a plan to destroy the fediverse with Threads, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that they’re just doing this because they can. If their plan was to take over the fediverse from within, and that plan hinged on instances not defederating out of caution, then it’s off to a poor start. I might just be totally naive but this feels more like them testing the water by opening their doors to the fediverse - I don’t know if they know what happens next.