A Forest, Not a Platform

A platform wants to be the ground you stand on. Everything routes through it, leaving means leaving everything, and the longer you stay the more it costs to go. The lock-in isn’t a side effect. It’s the business model wearing a friendlier word.

We’d rather grow a forest. Each tool we plant stands on its own and does one thing you actually needed. They share a look and a set of manners, the way trees in one wood share a climate, but none of them needs the others to live, and none is a trunk the rest depend on. You can love one and ignore the rest. You can take your files and walk out of any of them, whole.

The temptation, once a tool works, is to make it the center: a login everything hangs off of, a hub that quietly becomes the thing you can’t leave. We decline. The forest does fine on what passes through it. It never needed to own the river.