I can’t imagine how something like this might exist solely to boost engagement and draw additional user accounts. I’m sure that would be incredibly shocking (or just obvious as hell with user numbers being boosted by numerous bot accounts, as well as increased user time on site). “Reddit migration? What migration? Just look at how many users are coming back.”
It’s comically tragic how utterly gullible people are in general.
(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.
Me too. Facebook is the craigslist of Social Networks. Hard to go more than two posts without running into a scam or a business.
I’m not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn’t even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can’t interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the “better” experience with more direct activity. (And that’s without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly “popular” option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.
In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.
I’m strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.
I’d recommend that you make the changes more slowly, changing things to gibberish (random words), rather than using an app to do them all at one time. It is possibly for them to undo your edits and your deletes if you end up on their radar.
Over the course of days/week(s), you should slowly edit all of your old comments and posts into gibberish, and mark your posts as NSFW. Later, slowly start deleting posts/comments so that you won’t be a target of their rollbacks.
I’m quite glad that you find missing the entire point fascinating.
Yes, I concede that you’re right. You can certainly use lemmy/kbin only as a forum. You could certainly use Reddit as your “chat” platform too.
My entire point was that this person asked a question about trying to aggregate content; your toxic response was instead to talk about how terrible wanting that is and that they should just not want the thing that they were happy with. This is the type of high-quality “discussions” one can expect to bubble to the top in these silos.
This is the sort of echo-chamber romanticism you can expect in miniature silos. Fostering meaningful heartfelt individual conversations, person-to-person relationships, and small communities was never the intention. Its first-order focus has always been about a singular aggregated place for links on topics of interest, voted on by the followers of a tag/community, and sometimes spawning interesting discussions about those links in a peer-voted manner. Kbin and lemmy are both “aggregators”, like Reddit, not “social networks” or “forums”. [Edit: ability is not the same as intention]
Subscribing to hundreds of forums and RSS feeds with slightly different foci just to try to find the actual interesting stories, in most peoples opinions given Reddit and Diggs success, was decidedly not the “best” experience.
No one is preventing you from using things how you want, to seek our miniature echo-chambers so that your personal voice can be louder, but it is hardly the appropriate response to espouse how “great” microcosms are when someone is asking about how to better aggregate in a… checks notes… a “content aggregation” system.
Your wording needs some work there. If you’re trying to say that the “pile” would reach 1/4 low earth orbit and cover half the continental US, you’re absolutely incorrect. If you are saying it is a “pile of money” that “when laid out as a single layer can cover half of the continental US” or “when made into a single stack would reach 1/4 of the height of LEO”, that would be mostly accurate. For perspective, 44 billion would be 44k briefcases, or 440 pallets. That’s about 17 semi trailers (single high) or 9 trailers double-stacked. As a “pile” it could easily fit in a single Wal-mart parking lot and wouldn’t even be that high. Still a lot of money though.
Edit: Actually, I don’t even think the continental US number is accurate. A single bill is 16 in^2. Laid out as a single layer of single $1 bills, that covers ~7e11 in^2 which is about 175 square miles, not even 1/2 of Rhode Island.