For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my “value” from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. […] Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason

They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.

This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is “well I don’t think those costs are necessary”. But they are.

You really couldn’t be more wrong.

You don’t have to be a Randroid or a libertarian, or even right wing, to understand that a discourse predicated on everyone getting everything for free with no real trade-off doesn’t really make sense in the real world.

You’ve literally quoted two industry bodies who have a vested interest in keeping aspartame on the market.

Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.

I’ve always been underwhelmed with DuckDuckGo as a search engine, and for context on that remark I use Bing as my main search engine.

Facebook didn’t “destroy” XMPP. XMPP was a tiny messaging protocol nobody used, Facebook picked it up for a bit, stopped using it after a while, and then XMPP returned to being a tiny messaging protocol nobody used.

People are acting like Jabber was hot shit when Facebook picked it up, and its present state of irrelevance is because of big bad Zuck. No, no fucker used Jabber and it saw basically no mainstream adoption until Facebook and Google got involved, and as soon as Facebook and Google weren’t involved (as it turns out that XMPP actually kind of sucks and its unique features are things end users don’t care about) it returned to being a complete irrelevance. A well-intentioned irrelevance, to be sure, but an irrelevance.

Fediverse is the same, mutans mutandis. We’re tiny. I know it’s nice for us to psyche ourselves up and say that we’re going to destroy the big bad corporate media! but in reality we are a niche constellation of social networks that has literally 0.1% of Facebook’s user base and whose adoption has been, shall we say, not stellar.

That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.

For some reason, your link doesn’t work.

The second part of your comment doesn’t answer my question, nor would “they want our data!!!” explain why Meta would want or need to create an instance in order to get it, or how the “data” (what data? Your posts? The ones that ActivityPub syndicates to hundreds of other servers automatically? Do you know exactly which servers your posts are on at the moment?) of other users on other fedi instances could somehow be “monetised” by them.

Once Meta gets their foot in the door, I guarantee they will try to bully the fediverse into doing things their way. Hard pass for me.

Can you give any reasonable by means in which they could do this and succeed?

So much of this stuff just sounds like infeasible conspiracy theories. If, hypothetically, Meta did do such a thing (somehow, still not clear how or frankly why?) all that it would mean is that anyone who disagreed could defederate from Meta, or would be defederated from Meta… which given half the servers in existence seem to want to defed them up front anyway, doesn’t seem to make any odds.

It’s all just very confusing hearing about these lurid ideas for things Meta could do with the fediverse that simply don’t make a lick of sense either in terms of motivation or implementation.

Interesting assfuck.

That is all.

For real, I’ve been trying to learn Japanese on and off, love the country, like lot of its media (albeit not much anime) and I’m absolutely desperate to avoid being associated with those guys.

Most people who aren’t nonces recognise fairly instinctively that a sexual image of someone who appears to be a ten year old girl is a pretty noncey thing to both produce and look at, and that finding some level of sexual attraction to someone who looks like a ten year old is pretty noncey. But you know, weebs gonna weeb.