It’s actually three medium-sized online platforms in a trench coat.

It was worth it back when it was people renting out a spare room in their house or their whole apartment when they were away for a small bit of cash on the side, there was a mutual understanding that you are staying in another individuals private space with all the rules and caveats that come with that, so the pricing will reflect the arrangement. For me, this made the inconvenience worth putting up with in most cases.

Now that booking an AirBnb costs as much as a hotel room and the service has been overrun by landlords looking to use it as their primary rental income though? I’m booking a hotel every time. If I’m paying hotel money I want hotel service and convenience.

Meta entering this space is not something to celebrate. They don’t care in the slightest about fair play or open standards. They will use this as an opportunity to monopolise the fediverse (they have a strong track record for this) and push out open platforms in favour of their proprietary, data harvesting shit. Trusting Meta will be catastrophic for the fediverse.

This blog post explains in a bit more detail how this is a problem: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

As someone with a soft spot for the series, I personally enjoyed it well enough. It’s another Indiana Jones movie, it’s quite formulaic, but its fun and it works for its intended purpose. It was never going to be incredible, high-brow cinema and I do wonder why anyone who has seen any of the others expected it to be anything other than what it was.

Elon Musk says something fucking stupid, must be Tuesday.

I don’t think the idea is that it doesn’t matter, I think the idea is that if you disagree with someone, you should put some effort into it. On Reddit, the downvote function only really works to hide and punish opinions that the community sees as bad, which doesn’t really contribute very much in that respect. Upvotes work for indicating agreement because if you agree with a point you probably don’t have much to add to it, and if you do, you can both upvote and reply.

If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end.

“Simply by joining it” is not an accurate representation of what will happen in the slightest. Meta is not some scrappy little Lemmy instance operator relying on donations to keep the lights on, they’re one of the biggest companies in the world who simply do not care about fair competition or open standards, and they have a proven track record of using that position to either buy out or destroy competition.

When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end? You can make a project as resistant to corporate overreach as you like, infrastructure to run it still costs money and there is no fediverse operator on the face of the earth that is going to be able to outspend Meta when it comes to infrastructure and R&D. How is defederation not an appropriate response when smaller instances are crippled under the inevitable load stemming from Metas users?

Corporations have been embracing, extending and extinguishing FOSS projects in the tech space for decades now, and their demise has rarely been because of a fatal flaw in the projects themselves. It’s been an intentional play by Microsoft, Google et al to ensure that there is no viable open alternative to their walled gardens. Trusting them in any capacity is naïve at best and catastrophic at worst.

I encourage you to read this blog post which outlines these concerns much better than I can: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Anyone operating an instance should defederate from this shit immediately. This is exactly the kind of corporate overreach that isn’t welcome here. This will end very poorly for the fediverse I think.

ITT: People not understanding that if they don’t like the rules on one instance, they can use literally any other instance and that problem will evaporate.

Worship 🙏

I hope we can, but ultimately this is the internet. People are going to be dicks to each other. We just have to be the change we want to see.

I haven’t found one yet. I may start one.