this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Meta: The company whose products you use when you absolutely, positively, don't give a shit that they are the worst example of the worst nightmare of a consumer-hostile, privacy-invading, you-are-the-product, tech company. Yes, even worse than Microsoft.
If it's free, you are the product.
Well now even when you pay you're the product.
This just doesn't hold up in 2024. BMW charge you 60k for a vehicle and chuck a subscription on top. Apple, Google and Samsung charge between hundreds and thousands for their phones and advertise with their own agencies. Amazon forces paying customers to wade through bullshit products to finally buy the one they want, customers who bought prime and who didn't.
Everyone is the product even if you pay. Stop saying this please.
It’s not an either or. It’s _if it’s free, you’re the product _. That’s it. It’s not saying anything about if you pay for it.
So it's misdirection. It should be "You're the product". Free or not doesn't matter.
Sorry, but that's irrelevant to "if it's free..." implication. Those are just unrelated ways companies made suckers out of their customers.
I haven't paid for Lemmy yet. Well, other than volunteer time.
I guess if we want something where we're not the product, we have to build it ourselves.
Even without any potential monetization by anyone... you kind of are? You are part of the community here, and that's what people come here for. Lemmy's community is the product it offers, and you are a piece of it.
I wish more people on Reddit and Twitter would recognize that and use more discretion with who they're creating a product for.
What makes you so sure that the person hosting your instance isn't monetizing it or trying to find a way to monetize it in the background?
Maybe they're selling all these posts and DMs to OpenAI?
Lemmy.world is a registered non-profit organization. https://fedihosting.foundation/about-us/
It's easy enough to use the API to scrape the site and use all the posts and DMs for free. It'd be odd for OpenAI to pay for it.
Please do recognize that anything you post publicly IS public, whether that's Facebook or here. The lack of an API isn't going to stop places from scraping your data off of Facebook or Reddit either.
Your DMs here are explicitly public. That's part of the federation between servers. If you want truly private DMs, there are options for that.
I suppose I should mention for full disclosure that I'm part of the (unpaid) staff here representing the Lemmy.World Community Team.
Not that I DMd people, but I don't think I knew that, so that's good to know.
But also don't mistake a not for profit as not being able to do something to aquire money to help pay for itself or the salaries of it's people. They could absolutely be looking for ways to monetize this to a certain extent. A not for profit is not a charity.
I'd recommend Signal for truly private messaging. I've heard things about Matrix, and the warning mentions Element.io, nether of which I'm personally familiar with.
Oh, well that's a great warning. Glad they put that there.
And ya I already use signal.
They don't need to sell access... It's free. Assume anything you post here is getting sniffed up by everyone.