This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.

We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.

They’re the same answer.

You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.

It’s not about serving assets it’s about hiding telemetry from adblockers, dns filters, ip lists, etc.

Almost every B2C company I’ve worked at, I’ve written or had my devs write proxies for whatever trackers we use. The reality is that every company to whom this data matters to figure out their business model will proxy their trackers. If they don’t they need to fire their lead engineers.

It’s actually pretty easy to disguise this traffic even to the point where you can use the originating server/cdn to interleave the tracking with the content source.

I think one thing you guys should keep in the back pocket, is that Mozilla jobs are the outlier. The average Open Source Developer salary is very close to the US Federal poverty line. They’re paid mostly in comped passes to conventions. Most of the “averages” you see are compiled from data from companies like Mozilla. OSS devs are typically make around $30k in pure cash, even for ones working on large projects. The only OSS devs that make between the $95k and $150k (25th and 75th percentiles) you’ll see online are ones that work for Mozilla, or Intel, or whoever.

What makes this possible is MIT licensing models that corpos shilled in the 2000’s and 2010’s that directly benefit corperate engineering costs, but don’t contribute back nearly the value they extract. If the majority was GPL + copyright assignment, there would be income streams for leveraging OSS projects in closed source applications via licensing deals.

But the genie is out of the bottle on most of these things. See how Amazon is effectively forking an destroying existing OSS models via AWS provisioning of things like redis and elasticache.