BraveSirZaphod

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.

I mean, yes?

If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

This may be a cynical view, but even if that does happen, the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact and at worst be relegated to a small community of tech nerds, which is to say, basically the status quo.

Facebook, and literally anyone else, can already get all your content.

It would take all of a second to scrape your user page. Obviously that wouldn’t grant your IP address or anything, but neither would federation.

It’s publicly sitting on the internet.

Meta also doesn’t need to federate in order to do that, since federation just accesses public data.

That’s completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.

The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.

Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.

Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogremoved, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.

Kbin is a bit saner on average, in my experience.

I’m not going to engage with a response that’s completely lacking in any semblance of good faith.

Sure, but if the knife enthusiasts group is also promoting to you a “Slashing Children With Knives Enthusiasts” group, I think it’s worth criticizing.

And it is absolutely worth hiding from people who want to use it if the group in question is hosting pedophilia.

Speaking as a gay guy, there is an astroturf effort from the alt-right to try to paint the LGBT community as being so “inclusive” as to also include literal pedophiles, as if it’s just another sexuality or kink, and I’d rather prefer to nip that squarely in the bud by drawing a very hard line.