Most certainly if this grows big enough corporations will join in if only to market whatever products to the userbase.

What you can do is to work on supporting/curating instances which don‘t want this. Try to see what kind of people are in charge and what their reaction would be. For example I‘m also on an instance (http://lemmy.dbzer0.com/) created by a r/piracy mod who I‘m fairly certain wouldn‘t federate with corporations or let his instance be controlled by them.

Lemmy.ml which I‘m also on, probably not positive with US companies, but might federate with Chinese companies.

What makes all this not a big concern for me is how easy it is for me to drop an instance and go to another one, but I‘m also not attached to my users in general, hopefully we can get some export/import functions for cases where we need to abandon somewhere (unless it exists and I haven‘t seen it yet?).

I love you for explaining this so clearly, I was actually so confused about this I may or may not have misinformed someone else, oops.

Austria: not often and I like that. Not a fan of nationalism, so the less visible this is in my life the better. I see flags IRL mainly on government functions and when right wingers parade around, maybe also near football matches, that‘s about it.

I‘d like to think the history with Nazis made it less popular, but the actual amount of far-right voters makes me think I might just live in a happy little bubble and I’d be shocked if I looked into people‘s cellars.

This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.

Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.

Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.

If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.

They could pay me now and I wouldn‘t to back, and if my habit to type re… into my browser doesn‘t go away soon I‘m gonna block it on my router for myself. A place I went to for 10+ years and all I feel now looking at it is disgust, well done spez!

Nice article though, didn‘t pull any punches.

I have considered it, but I didn‘t do it cause I had bad experiences with police in my life leading me to think of them and more broadly the state as useless at best or harmful at worst. I don‘t want anyone to shoot the dog, I just want it to be quiet. I tried communicating that with my neighbours, but that didn‘t work either as they said they would try to train it or something and just didn‘t.

Either way, I found some coping mechanisms like my noise machine, going to the office to avoid WFH (I like it, but not here!) and noise cancelling and in a year I want to move again and this time I plan to spend a few hours at any apartments to check for loud dogs first.

The new spez company strategy will work because it has been tried and tested in many dictatorships in human history. The elites and workers (mods) in institutions (subs) critical to the state (company) regularly need to be purged of dissenters (protesters) to signal the strength of the dictator and make a coup (change in leadership) seem impossible. This lets those who are against the current course of the state lose their will to fight and pursue other avenues like flight (why I‘m here). It also gives a feeling of safety to those who don‘t care or support, since they need to see less of us dissenters.

Though, in the long run (and I mean many years), I think it will backfire. People like to read all kinds of comments even mine thought they are often cynical/paranoid mess. So without dissenters, it becomes a sludge of sameness that appeals only to the most boring people. Hopefully leading to a growth of decentralized platforms like the fediverse!

It is similar to a coup but from the top, so it‘s more like “consolidating power” phase which dictatorships do go through. Dissenters get removed and replaced by willing servants until the platform is more spez and less “The People”. Meanwhile he pretends like somehow the mods are the actual dictators or some shit to make all this palatable to those that still use Reddit, which in my cynical view they will eat up. Reddit is dead and done for anyone who values actual community over ads.

They‘re fine if anyone with some critical thought leaves and the only ones left behind are the master bootlickers who would eat a plate of shit as long as it got served by Reddit.

Could even be seen as an improvement to them considering that includes communities like r/piracy which the mere existence of could hurt their capitalist investors feelings.

That is what I expected next. My only alternative to Apollo to use Reddit adfree was the mobile browser with adblock.

Spez also apparently called the mods “landed gentry” which is hilarious coming from a rich fuck behaving like a king towards some people who work for him for free!

Good point, reminds me of other attempts to break strikes, you can shoot people dead, but you can‘t shoot them to work. Well, you can attempt the threat of it and maybe some will half-assed pretend to work and others will turn to sabotage, so more accurate would be you can‘t force them to do good work. Even more so for volunteers.

Pathetic. How anyone can deal or invest with “businessmen” like Trump and Musk who mainly grift, steal, lie and don‘t even pay their debts—no clue!

Let the dog outside and bark for 15-30 minute stretches of time, no matter the hour of day. I’d get woken up randomly sometimes until I got a noise machine to at least somewhat drown it out.

I‘ll never forget this cause dealing with it for 2+ years now has changed my whole attitude on dogs, I always thought I might eventually own one and now it‘s the last thing I want in this world. Though I acknowledge some people are good owners with well trained dogs, awful owners like my neighbour now stick out to me and annoy me much more too.

Apart from all the good Lemmy suggestions, right now I think is a good moment to mention it on Reddit posts in related communities, especially in response to people complaining about the current way Reddit is going.

I‘ve come here from when various shit got deleted/banned off r/piracy and people in the comments mentioned the piracy Lemmy.

I‘ve been on Reddit for 10+ years, I think it is normal to at least feel disoriented. Existentially, I recommend the Myth of Sisyphus—it‘s all meaningless, but we can find joy and meaning for ourselves in meaningless activities.

I personally enjoy having the downvotes and seeing them too, but I think it‘s neat communities on here have that option anyway.

I hate ads with a passion due to my experiences in the marketing industry and will go out of my way to never watch any. I also don’t want to pay for random internet content, especially not to companies on the stock market. (Though I do use Patreon a bit for some content creators)

Can‘t explain it much more than that. If youtube locks me out due to that, so be it. I don‘t get worked up either, I simply state my opinion on it where I please and if I‘m not wanted I leave. That‘s about it.

I knew a lot of people would follow spez and toe the company line, just like they did with Twitter. I don‘t mind, I‘d rather hang out here without all them anyway.

Gone downhill ever since Aaron left RIP. I think if it dies it will be slow and sad, but probably for the best. The model of putting all the power into the hands of some greedy company isn‘t working well for internet communities.