The issue people have with making the distinction is that Google is trying to spin the narrative and make side loading seem like a dangerous and bad thing to the average user base who don't know any better.
They're taking umbrage with you agreeing that quantitative usage of a storefront makes something simply installing vs side loading a program. Because it helps Google's narrative in a way.
There have been leaks about the Deckard 2 for years now and people always say that Valve will announce it any day now. I'll believe it when I see it at this point.
And all the big "innovations" have been in venture capitalist bubbles like AI, NFTs, etc. or soured by the companies and people behind them. I hear SpaceX has been doing some cool stuff, but all I can see is Musk making a flying Cyber Truck for his ego on NASA's dollar. One of the reactors at 3 Mile Island is coming back online, the first US nuclear power project in who knows how many years...in order to fuel Microsoft's AI data centers.
Advancements in tech used to be about pushing the boundaries of what we're capable of. Now, it's all about pushing the boundaries of how much money the oligarchs can stuff into a single pocket.
Facebook is the best and worst thing to have happened to VR. The Quest is an affordable headset that basically killed all competition and innovation in VR for years. Still holding out hope that the next Valve headset will come out eventually and shake up the scene again.
I honestly have no idea, that would be going much farther back in Reddit's history than I was on the platform for. It reminds me of Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto, though. It's true until somebody realizes that there's a lot of money to be made doing the thing that you said you wouldn't do.
Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.
This is only one study, but I saw an article a few months ago talking about a study by a major phone company that found that the vast majority of people (80% or more IIRC) either didn't care about AI features on their phones or actively disliked them.
I think most people don't really care one way or another but hate that it's being shoved into everything, and those who know the stats on how often it's wrong are a lot more likely to actively dislike it and be vocal about their dislike.
If we're going with the "suicide" analogy, I'd say that AI is suicide like eating fast food/takeout every night instead of cooking for yourself is. It's an easy shortcut, but you are probably missing out on vital nutrients (in the case of AI, that would be critical thinking skills or potentially missing out on finding a hobby that you actually really enjoy). You could instead learn to cook yourself (which some people really enjoy and find as a meditative kind of experience), hire a nutritionist to make a meal plan, or even go to a restaurant instead.
Personally, I don't think it's a great analogy, and there's a much better basically 1 to 1 relationship between Gen AI and retail therapy/fast fashion. They're all bad for the environment, rely on worker abuse in many different forms, and all work to further our dependency on corporations and enrich their owners.
People often make the argument about Gen AI "democratizing" art, but that's nonsense. Art was already "democratized" by easy access to not just tools like a pencil and knowledge, but by the fact that even before the internet art was the most easily accessible it has ever been in history. You could go to a store and buy a canvas to put on your wall in the 50s. A century before and that would've been something only the wealthy could think of doing by hiring an artist to make a custom piece. People complain about artists charging too much, and yet a large portion of artists charge below minimum wage for commissions.
And that's not to say that I hate AI for the sake of hating it. I hate the implementation of it. Gen AI is just a more complex version of the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop. But it's fed with effectively stolen labor and robs artists of potential clients, people from possibly discovering a new thing they love doing, and clients from developing a working relationship with the artists that they commission. There's a great post that Temmie of Undertale fame posted recently about how when Toby can't describe what he wants animated he'll act it out and so he danced around with a broom to show her how he wanted the idle animation for an old man to go. That's the kind of stuff that can come up in the commission process. Obviously that's not gonna happen to everyone, but half the fun of art is the collaboration. It's like playing a co-op game.
I knew there was a reason I kept this photo around.
What they're saying is that you said that the bubble has kinda already popped because (insert description of the middle of the dot com bubble here when smaller companies began to join in). Based on that, the bubble hasn't popped at all, small companies are just able to buy in as well before the collapse hits.
They mean a physical Target store, not a phone app. Target can track customers walking in and out the door and what they buy, how long they stay, etc. but they can't track anything about you if you just go to a different store, especially something like a small business which isn't hooked into the ad data sponge.