> They can't put themselves between and the consumer.

Of course they can. If they smell money and sell, they can change it to whatever they want. It's just a client for now.

It's like arguing for Skype back then based on tech aspects. It's P2P! Yes, P2P until it wasn't.

Youtube wasnt distribute in tech, but was in marketing and if you were there around 2007-10, you remember it was much less social-media-ified and felt more direct and raw. Subscribe and get notified. Just a platform.

The only way to avoid that same path is by remaining obscure and small.

I guess every new generation of tech enthusiasts has to get burned to get sufficiently disillusioned.

The code is open source and FOSS. They could try a bait-and-switch and they would see a dozen forks 30 minutes after the announcement.

Consumers don’t use protocols, they use branded software. Hence why Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is/was so effective.

How is "Extinguish" part going for them in regards to Linux?

There is no "Extinguish" for open source applications, systems and protocols. The closest attempt at EEE that one could try to argue was Facebook/Google leveraging XMPP at first for their messenger apps (FB Messenger/Google Talk) and then closing them down, but even that would not be accurate, given that the number of people using "truly open" XMPP has not gone down.

Talking about "branded" software is nonsense. People use what is most convenient and helps them achieve their goals. If there are no significant vendor lock-in, the cost of swithcing from open source vendor to another is essentially zero. GrayJay has no lock-in, all they do is aggregation of different video platforms.