Kichae

The buyers are the Guillmots and Tencet, which are the groups who already control everything. It's just a way to get scrutiny off of them.

And why is the url they send always "website.com/survey-name/[random hash]"? Why are there trackers on this totally anonymous, fo sho, survey link?

I do know. I just don't care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.

They're choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don't want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can't have it.

It's got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.

The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that's.... just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.

Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don't want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.

If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.

Profit is what's left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It's either what you've over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.

And that's wrong.

It's frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.

There's a deep undercurrent of "angry, hostile nerd". When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of "Finally, the recognition we deserve!" and also "you're in my house now, you fucking normie, and you'd better start acting like it".

Unsurprisingly, the "fucking normies" noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.

But we're going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let's us ignore that we are the problem.

Couldn't disagree more.

The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you're using. That means, if I'm running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I'm platforming everyone who has contact with my website.

And I'm not going to want to platform a lot of people. I'm not going to want to pay to host their posts. I'm not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don't run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.

Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse.

The vast majority of people landed on the largest severs, where there was a ton of chatter in both the Local and Global feeds. They couldn't find anyone because they were accustomed to using search to find connections, and Mastodon's search is so tightly locked down that it's borderline impossible to find who or what you're looking for. The idea of checking other feeds didn't even seem to occur to many people -- something that I, as an avid "what's that button do?" user, find totally bizarre, but seems to be rather standard for most people interacting with new things.

If the default view had been Local or something, the story could have been very different.

many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway

This really shouldn't be a consideration. ActivityPub is a public standard for this kind of communication between websites, and the protocol really needs to be agnostic about which websites one is interested in using it to connect with. "I don't want Amazon using HTTP along side my indie blog" is a nonsensical statement, and so it "I don't want Facebook using ActivityPub".

You have to remember, when capitalists discuss "efficiency", what they actually mean is the efficiency with which they capture other peoples' money. The most efficient system is one that provides guaranteed revenue and incurs no costs.

Pfft. Obviously the kids these days want to work random hours with no notice for less than minimum wage!