Thanks for clarifying that!

Thanks!

Thanks!

Yep… and that’s a blockin’ anyhow.

Schadenfreude intensifies…

100% true, I should have acknowledged that!

That’s a really interesting bit of nuance that I’d never taken note of! Thanks!

Stockholm Syndrome is the only explanation I can come up with at this point.

But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future

I see where you are coming from there, and I don’t disagree with your opinion, but I do still think that while that may objectively be a mindset that is potentially harmful, I feel the net impact in this context is more likely to be increased contribution to and support of things that really are Free (gratis and libre), nudging reality closer to a place where a lot of those sorts of services are free or donation-supported, and less likely to be in corporate hands unless those corporations improve their behavior.

A hard to summarize version of that sort of path and mindset is what initially pushed me away from Windows, but over more than a decade I’ve developed lots more reasons than cost for why I’d never go back, and for why I’ve become a Free Software enthusiast and advocate.

I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.

The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.

While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.

And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.

When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)

Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.

I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.

More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.

There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.

We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.

I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.

we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade

I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.

It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”

Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.

That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.

Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn’t give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.

People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.

Now Google have decided since they can’t reliably exploit enough of their users, it’s time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with “we aren’t asking you for $$, so don’t worry about how we’re paying for all this, trust me bro.”

The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren’t going down quietly.

No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.

The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.

Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.

Google, Meta, Microsoft.

Three companies I would never trust as a VPN provider. Not necessarily in that order.

This is an incorrect assumption, because

And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

In a non snarky way I say that if the dozens of actual past actions linked in the two wikipedia links, plus the recent events I linked, still leave you in doubt, I don’t see how a plausible but still speculative EEE summary is going to tip you over, but I’ll clap anyway if it does, so:

https://lemmy.ml/comment/9792668

Quoting @Gestrid@lemmy.ca :

What’s the number of Threads users compared to Lemmy? If the number of Threads users greatly outweigh the number of Lemmy users, then we’d simply be drowned out by all the Threads posts. That’s part one of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Extend adds functionality to Threads that Lemmy either can’t support or won’t support for a while due to development time. People migrate to Threads because Lemmy is “missing” functionality. Plus, though I’m not clear on the exact legal specifications, proprietary code can be added to open-source code, and the proprietary code would be copyrighted. In other words, Lemmy devs would have to figure out a way to interact with and mimic Threads’ proprietary code using open-source code.

Extinguish is when Threads’ support of Lemmy is eventually dropped. The users left on Lemmy have suddenly lost a huge amount of content, and they’re left with fewer users than before Threads enabled federation.

There are definitely limits to my optimism here.

I do feel a little bit bad being the table pounding pessimist in this circumstance, but I don’t see how one can look at this company’s history and come to any other conclusion. It frustrates me like few other areas of disagreement about tech do to imagine folks look at everything Meta has done and think we need to wait and see how they will handle this.

Regardless, I appreciate the conversation. :)

I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.

Already done, and by an order of magnitude at least. (probably many orders, I don’t have the numbers at hand)

I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.

You can look at their entire history for that. And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta, and at the end of the day my freedom ends where yours begins, so although I will continue to advocate for defederation and flee any instance that does not make that choice, I very sincerely encourage you to do you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platforms

Here’s a couple recent individual ones:

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/26/meta-gaza-censorship-warren-sanders/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/

The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.

I firmly believe that hoping Meta isn’t going to be the worst possible company they can this time is not the way to achieve that, and is in fact actively working against that future possibility.

I’ve been alive, adult, and working in IT for the entirety of the existence of Facebook, so I’ve had a long time to see everything I needed to see about them.

f people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?

That’s one of the effects of defederating. And you are still ignoring the overall point of the comment 2 layers up from your reply.

Really I think you are losing the forest for the trees. Meta/Facebook/Zuck is a known quantity. They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can. We don’t need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true. They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them? Can we make the fediverse invisible to them? Of course we can’t, but why would we cooperate in any way?

Folks who don’t think this is a problem can use an instance that federates with them, just as I’ve chosen ( and will always choose) an instance that does not.

There is no reasonable argument for trying to be a good neighbor to Meta, because you can always, always be sure that Meta has no concern for being a good neighbor to you.

I don’t really see the point of this comment.

• Is it that we should not hold Threads at arms length because [citation needed] Zuck was once a tech idealist and had lots in common with current fediverse denizens? (setting aside my doubt for the moment)

If so, I don’t really care how nice and kind Zuck was when he was a freshman in college. I care about what he has done since then, and leading up to now.

• Is it that one day I may not like something large Lemmy instances do, so should not be so anti-Threads?

I don’t even get that idea, so I am guessing that can’t be it.

Much the same as Reddit, Google, Apple, etc. Do you remember? Those of us who lived through it remember.

I lived through using 8" floppies, so yes, I remember.

Which of those are open source projects that anyone can fork and/or run their own instance of at any time, providing a place for people to seamlessly transition from Reddit, Google, or Apple if they don’t like what those companies do with their platform? The comparison you are trying to make falls apart immediately.

for real. im new to lemmy but places like hexbear seem really good for trans stuff.

I am not trans, and so this may be incorrect, but while of course you can use any instance you choose, IIRC it’s https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ that is very explicitly trans-supportive at the instance level. (I’m not saying other instances are transphobic, to be clear)

Edit: I see you’ve already taken the convo far past the comment I replied to, sorry for not reading ahead!

deleted by creator