Bloonface

While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?

Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.

It'd be entirely open to Meta to simply turn off federation, in the same way that Truth Social and Counter Social have.

But honestly if I were them, given the hostile reaction I'd probably just do that and knock the whole ActivityPub thing on the head. It feels like a waste of time when realistically they would get more people on Threads/P92 in one day than a million Musk-buying-Twitters could do with Mastodon. Then everyone is happy - no Meta on fedi, Meta gets its new exciting Twitter clone that it fully controls.

Put it this way - either they're up to some form of non-specific evil, in which case they can probably achieve whatever goals they have far more concretely if they fully control the content on Threads, or they're not and all this is actually in good faith, in which case they're doing this for the benefit of a few hundred thousand fedi nerds who have reacted mostly with hostility and are going to block it on sight.

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.

The flipside is that a standard's not really open and a network founded on one isn't really resilient if certain groups or corporates arbitrarily aren't seen as "allowed" to use it, or if conversely a big corporate joining it is so toxic to the entire endeavour that it must be blocked on sight.

Chris Trottier, someone who I disagree with quite a lot and is a far bigger advocate for decentralisation as a public good than I am, is quite sanguine about P92 on those grounds.

Personally, I have no plans on my instances to submit P92 to any more stringent rules than I would with any other server blocks, that is I will give them exactly enough rope to hang themselves with.

I mean... realistically, why would that be their fault if they were to start a fedi instance and everyone else blocked them?

That kind of oversells what bias they might have.

They're well known as a reputable and honest polling organisation, regardless of their origins.

YouGov is a top-tier reputable polling company that weights its samples to avoid any such confounding factors.

Nobody. But they want to have Reddit coins to reward people who do things they like. So they have to pay for them to satisfy that want.

They might also pay for pizza, beer and cinema tickets too. Same difference.

Me and my partner pay jointly for Premium and I wouldn't want to go back. No ads on any device we watch on, knowing that the creators get a good chunk of change from it, is bliss.

That is precisely why I run my own instance, it's essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com

But honestly that's pretty much all it is. It's not really worth much more than that to me.

Yeah but you can tell from the context that search results are just a list of random web pages that maybe what Google says is bollocks.

Google gives you a bunch of results and says "here, look at these". LLMs confidently tell you things that they may have simply made up and present them as if they're real.

Gotta say I have no love for the big leftist subs but that's a pretty cheap shot.

Their choosing to purchase luxuries, in a world where luxuries must be paid for in a system they didn't design, choose or want to live under, doesn't negate that they are opposed to capitalism.

If you want to argue that they're possibly a bit too sanguine about the prospect of their favourite luxuries existing under communism or whatever, fair enough. But that's a separate argument from whether they're stupid to pay money for stuff that makes them happy.