I hope so! Just from personal experience, my whole online life so far has been a loop of moving to a cool platform with a good community, watching it slowly degrade into a toxic cesspool as more and more corporations fiddle with it, then hopping ship to the next one and watching that one gradually collapse too.
It’d be nice to get out of that cycle and find a good place to just hang out.
I’d have to agree. Facebook polluted up the social media landscape with their gross business tactics, to the point where many people ditched traditional social media entirely and created/moved to the fediverse. Now they’re getting ready to start dumping their toxic sludge here too, and I’d hope that most of the popular areas of the fediverse would just shut them out entirely. They deserve zero goodwill from anybody and are almost guaranteed to be bad-faith actors IMO.
I’m not holding out hope, however. I assume they’ll play nice for the first year or two, integrate with everything, and then enshittify this as well. It’s just the way things go.
Knowing what people are like, I could fully see us spending decades trying to reverse Brexit and being very explicitly clear that we won’t get the same deal we had, only for the general public to completely ignore all advice until two days before the referendum to rejoin and go “wtf we don’t want the Euro” (even if that’s not even on the table) and then vote against it again.
Yeah I do kind of suspect that’s an optimistic one. I could genuinely see us doing: 10 years of bickering over whether it’s going well or not, then 10 years of regret, 10 years trying to get back in but by a very slim margin while 48% of the voting public tries to undermine it at every turn, 10 years and untold amounts of money trying to meet the criteria to be let back in, then it goes to a vote and someone puts an idiotic slogan on the side of a bus again and it doesn’t go through. Then we go back to square one.
I come back and mess around with it once a year or so. I’m an Original Backer so it’s become kind of an annual tradition at this point. Also I have one of those red AMD ships which I think are kind of rare or something?
I tend to prefer KDE because I’m a tinkerer, but I don’t hate GNOME or anything. I think it’s good for someone who wants the UI to just work and generally get out of the way without much fiddling, although last time I tried it I did find it needed a few extensions to add some basic stuff for whatever reason.
But ultimately, I think it’s good to have choices for both sides of the spectrum, that’s kind of what FOSS is all about in the end.