Ask Paul: November 11 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I'm back in Pennsylvania for just a few days, so here's one last Ask Paul from the apartment in Macungie, as we're moving when I get back from my next trip, to Seattle next week for Microsoft Ignite.
Social media
christianwilson asks:

I know you continue to use X (and have business reasons for needing to do so) and I think you've been using Mastodon, but have you tried Bluesky?

No. I had an invite, but I already have trouble keeping track of all the social media accounts I have to manage. I suspect the obvious move for me (from Twitter/X) will be to Threads. And I would have started this transition already if Meta would just implement an API so that the service I use to auto-post to social media (dlvr.it) could push our posts there too. When that happens---I guess it's on the way---I will look at posting more there and see what happens.

For now, I'm on still on Twitter/X primarily, and of course, we have a Thurrott.com account as well. I'm on Mastodon personally. I'm on Facebook personally, and there's a Thurrott.com account there too. I'm on Instagram personally. And we have two YouTube channels, one for Thurrott.com and one for Eternal Spring. It's a lot to manage and some of these services (Facebook, cough) make it particularly hard to manage multiple accounts.

But the issue, as always, is scale. I have over 125,000 followers on Twitter, but only 3,500 on Mastodon and less than 2,000 on Threads (though I have never once posted there).

Nothing will replace what Twitter was. I don't think we can expect that. The microblogging concept can still be beneficial though and I'm just curious if you've been trying other platforms.

You're right about Twitter: Nothing will ever replace it. But … perhaps multiple services can fill the gap in time. We're going to find out, as I don't see anything ever improving at Twitter, and it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to move on.
Crazy, or crazy like a fox?
spacecamel asks:

With the "enshittification" that Microsoft is doing with Onedrive and other things like ads in Windows, how much more can Microsoft do before it starts to hurt their usage share? 

I think about little else these days. This problem started in Windows 8 with the first ads and has exponentially multiple across Windows 10 and 11, with more and more ads, bundled crapware (in the wake of Microsoft killing its Signature PC program), forced telemetry and tracking, antagonistic, forced app and services usage (Microsoft Edge, OneDrive), and other bad behavior. It's hard to look at this escalation over the years and not think that it's purposeful, that Microsoft, for some crazy reason, is literally trying to drive users away.

That said, enshittification actually does explain this behavior, and that explanation makes more sense than Microsoft wanting to drive customers away. As I wrote back in March, it's impossible to not see enshittification everywhere in personal technology once you're m...