Dæmon S.

To us, perhaps.

To the kind of people who’d have the “power” to enforce the kind of prohibition you’re advocating for, the lawmakers and bureaucrats from regulatory agencies, most of them (if not all of them) can’t even tell where’s the “any” key the computer is asking them to press (“press any key to continue”), so you can only imagine them knowing what an ActivityPub is (maybe they’ll see the “pub” at the end and think “hey, kids shouldn’t be allowed in a pub”).

Are you, by any means, aware of what Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms) is (are)?

and attract millions of followers

Argumentum ad populum (if said “millions” are actual Homo sapiens individuals, because “Dead Internet Theory” became so real that there’s this strange phenomenon in which bots are following and watching other bots, sometimes even themselves) isn’t necessarily a proof that something’s “good”. For example, poop also attracts millions of flies, yet it doesn’t make poop tasty. This serves both for actual Homo sapiens “influencers” and simulacra of said “influencers”: quantity doesn’t mean quality.

I’d a “googol” (pun intended) times more prefer following a stranger’s Neocities blog with less than a half a dozen followers than follow a person (regardless of whether their content is good or awful) who’ve been keeping millions of people hostage, together with themselves, to a parasocial relationship inside a platform from a monopolistic corporation (Google, owner of Youtube) from which neither are willing to release themselves. I say this as someone who have been actively boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, I never watched Youtube anymore, not even through circumvented manners. Yeah, I miss some of the STEM channels from there, but if they didn’t seek Fediverse platforms and alternative donation-based platforms to be humanly closer to their audience, they don’t care about their audience at all so they don’t care about me as someone who values privacy and hates corporations.

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As I’m interacting from a non-Lemmy (Catodon) instance, I’ll interpret the question as a broader “What made you join the Fediverse?”.

In a nutshell, the open-source nature, the possibility of having choices (I can choose between instances and platforms), decentralization, distance from capitalist interests and from enshittification, the shared resonance to some of my principles, among other reasons.

I used to have a Lemmy account (The Lemmy Club) but I’m fond of a platform where I can have both a personal microblogging feed alongside the interactions with the communities on the threadiverse (Lemmy, Piefed, mbin, etc), and Misskey/Sharkey/Catodon is this platform. I also have accounts on other platforms, namely Mastodon, PixelFed, Friendica and tootik (Fediverse platform for geminispace/geminiprotocol, which has nothing to do with Google despite the name), but Catodon is the platform I’ve been using the most.

Also, I didn’t come from Reddit, I didn’t even use to use Reddit despite having had an account there many years ago. I don’t even how who exactly is this “spez” y’all talk about. I mostly used from Orkut (back when it existed in 2010s) all the way to TikTok (up to a few years ago) before I ditched it all and pivoted to decentralized platforms. Nowadays, the only mainstream social platform I still have (against my own values, I eager to ditch it) is the damn WhatsApp because Brazilians around me use it as their must-have instant messaging, otherwise I’d have exclusively decentralized platforms.

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