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🧵 The Attie backlash feels familiar. Not the "AI is bad part" but the "Company absorbs community feature" part. I spent 10+ years in the Magento ecosystem and watched eBay/Adobe do this multiple times. Were people upset? Yeah. Did we survive? Also yeah. Grandpa tells a story 👇

Adobe absorbed Page Builder (community had BlueFoot CMS), multi-warehouse inventory (Amasty, Magestore had extensions), B2B features (Cart2Quote, Aheadworks), search (competing with Klevu, Algolia). Platform eats ecosystem feature on repeat.

Almost none of those vendors died. Some went deeper: Amasty built "Advanced MSI" on top of the basic native version. Others diversified: Mageplaza expanded to Shopify. Yet others pivoted: Magestore became a Point-of-Sale company. Some got acquired into larger agencies.

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What we saw: core integrations are usually more basic/generic. The platform team has to support every edge case for the broadest audience. Community products can specialize, go deeper for users who actually want the feature. The platform version validates the category. It grows the total market.

That doesn't mean nobody got hurt. Cart2Quote had their core product replicated nearly 1:1 by Magento's Negotiable Quotes. Some vendors had to make painful pivots. Being sherlocked forces you to differentiate or die. That was real and it was uncomfortable.

And yes, the comms around Attie were bad. Celebrating community projects on stage and then demoing competitor with no heads-up is clumsy at best. The chilling effect on investor confidence is a legitimate concern. Both deserve better from Bluesky.