There’s just no good reason to have a profit motive in social media when it simply doesn’t need to be there.

Exactly! In that regard, it’s like health care. The profit motive can only harm the public.

ActivityPub integration is another feature they can use to get attention.

See, that’s what I don’t understand. ActivityPub means nothing to the vast majority of potential Threads users. There’s no way that Meta is going to use ActivityPub to gain users; all they have to do is what they HAVE done, leverage Instagram. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they may be hoping that federation will allow them to get around the EU’s limitations.

But even that doesn’t really make sense. Zuck doesn’t really care that much about regulations. He breaks them all the time. Which leaves me with the question, why ActivityPub? What aren’t we seeing?

That’s an interesting point. Can anyone take your original content and repost it to make money? As I understand it, anything you create is theoretically copyrighted at the moment you created. You’re not required to file a copyright, at least not in the United States.

That’s a pretty poor summary. It’s not all that much shorter than the blog post itself. Could you tell the AI to be much more concise?

I boycott all the products of big corporations as much as possible. I’m not even slightly tempted to try Threads.

I’ve been on the internet since the mid-80s, so I’ve pretty much seen it all. The current era has been characterized by widespread corporate takeovers, relegating independent sites to the backwaters of the internet at best. Forums for public comment used to be common, particularly on news sites; now they’re mostly gone, relegated to a few massive sites and services which are heavily censored, swarming with bots, and easily controlled.

Free speech was mostly the rule; now it’s strictly forbidden, particularly speech against the interests of corporations and the ruling class. Even if you DO find a place online where you can speak against the oligarchy, it’s guaranteed that you’ll be speaking into a void.

You can have all the free speech you want, as long as no one ever hears you.

The process of enshittification rules the day. Search engines which used to provide useful results now produce nothing but advertising and bot-fodder; on a recent Google search for blog entries about a topic of public interest, I literally got no results other than advertising. Blogs have effectively been eliminated from general public view, unless you go specifically looking for one that you already know about.

Technologically, broadband is the sole province of massive corporations which provide the shittiest service possible at the highest prices. There used to be talk of setting up small internet networks that would be outside the control of corporations and the government (which are now, of course, the same thing); that’s utterly forgotten now. Governments all over the world now have kill-switches for the internet that can be used at any time, and that very definitely includes the United States.

There was a time when it was hoped that the internet would finally give power to the people. Instead, it’s being used to enslave us even more.

The closest thing I’ve seen to any sign of hope over the last several decades is the development of the Fediverse.

Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that’s left to produce content and moderate subs! /s

Aaaannnddd…autodeleted by bot. Links to other sites are forbidden.

Good idea! I just posted a link to r/politicalhumor.

But aren’t Squabbles and Tilde both not federated, and therefore potentially subject to changes or even an IPO by the owners?

There is a mobile app for kbin, though. It’s not great, but it exists. I’m using it right now!

Inertia is the most powerful force in the universe…of human psychology.

God, I hope so. I don’t see any way to stop the billionaires from killing off our species, at this point. But I want to at least see those psychotic monsters suffer before we all go!

Same here. I’m kind of suspecting that Reddit isn’t going to be giving me my data anytime soon, if ever!

Yeah, I’m another old school early adopter who was on the internet since the '80s. No way the enshittification and souring of Reddit was caused by boomers and Gen xers. Most of them wouldn’t know how to get on, and those who would… Honestly, I’m the only boomer I know who is on there. Well, unless you go to some of the subreddits that are specifically for people over 50. And those people are incredibly nice! One of the few things I will really miss about Reddit.