Nougat

That’s just God telling you to go to the bad gateway.

You shall not think of living things in hierarchical order (x is better than y)

Having to choose between my child and my dog would be a horrible choice to have to make, but I know exactly how I would make it.

I said no such thing.

Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.

Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.

Are you some bizzaro world version of me?

The main reason behind Reddit’s API changes and Twitter Blue is money. This is and always will be the driving force for companies.
It makes sense. The people need to be payed, the servers need to be run.

Twitter Blue exists because Musk is an asshat, and screwed himself out of billions of dollars, and he’s trying to claw some back. Reddit’s API changes are because they’re trying to set up for an IPO to line the pockets of the board and executives, not just of Reddit, but of Advance Publications, the parent company.

That IPO set up isn’t only about profitability right now, it’s also about the profitability of reddit going forward. The effect of all the nonsense that’s going on over there is that the userbase is having the critical people culled away, leaving only the people who don’t understand or care. This means that Reddit The Company will be more in control of the content. Advertisers don’t like their ads showing up next to porn, and it’s arguable that people who are critical of the way reddit behaves are less likely to click ads (on purpose), and certainly less likely to convert into customers for those advertisers.

Did Reddit The Company plan it that way? Not a chance. They’ve been doing stupid things hamfistedly for a while, some might say since the very beginning.

As a counter to your opinion that the fediverse is not the future of the internet: Meta jumped in, Threads is an ActivityPub platform. Wikimedia has an instance now. I believe the Netherlands government stood up an instance. I don’t know the federation status of any of those, but it’s something.

The difference between standalone siloed platforms like Instagram, or Reddit, or, Digg, or SomethingAwful, or Fark, or Twitter, or, or, or – is that ActivityPub is a protocol. Anyone can write code to create a platform to use ActivityPub, and have that platform interact with other ActivityPub content in a myriad of ways. I fully expect there to come an ActivityPub platform that really catches on, much more powerfully than any of the current ones out there.

I had a pager so that my wife could contact me when she was at work.

“Search engines” were often just human-curated indexes.

Are you looking for only people who access ActivityPub content via a Lemmy instance, or are other platforms allowed to respond?

Southern Appalachia

The internet didn’t really exist when I was growing up, but my own parents didn’t really raise me, either. I did a lot of figuring out on my own.

It’s where I happened to land, but I’ve been quite happy. ernest is the dev, and he’s tops. There’s a KBin Enhancement Suite going already which includes a toggle for @username@instance display, as well as plenty of other things. hariette is developing Artemis as a kbin-compatiable mobile app for iOS and Android (which also promises future lemmy compatibility). The kbin interface is pretty clean and intuitive, and I’m looking forward to how it matures.

Really, if your instance is just for you and your account (maybe a few friends, family), and you’re not running any communities on it (all your posts and comments are on other instances), there’s really no reason anyone would defed you. Unless you’re a dick.

I have to think that if your very small private instance was federated with a large public instance, your instance would pull down content from the public one. That’s bandwidth, and that’s costing the large instance some amount of money/performance. Because your small private instance isn’t “giving back” a level of content that the large instance would want or need, that could be the unpredictable reason you mentioned.

Now, I don’t see that being a real issue unless there are so many low-content instances that Large Instance reviews their usage and finds out that an unacceptably high portion of their bandwidth is being used by “leeches,” and wants to control cost.

Let me restate the thing I was originally responding to:

Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning.

This statement is so childishly oversimplified that it’s just wrong. It might make people “feel better” about piracy (in particular, their own piracy actions), but it does so based on a plainly invalid argument. That’s what I have been trying to point out.

Are there problems with the way media sales are handled? Absolutely. When Amazon is able to pull your purchases back out of your access that they made consumers feel that they would have unlimited and perpetual access to (even if the very fine print said otherwise), that’s a huge problem. If a particular piece of media just isn’t available anywhere except for via streaming (or, frankly, anywhere at all outside of piracy), that’s also a problem.

OP’s post doesn’t address any of that. The suggestion is that “If I have paid for something, I (edit: should) have full, unlimited, and perpetual ownership rights to it.” That’s just not true; the landscape of commerce is far more complicated than that, and it’s a mistake to just join into a weird hug box about it.

The general public does not understand federation. When Threads makes content that I have created via kbin.social visible on Threads, very many people are going to think that that content was created on Threads. And Meta then takes that content, aggregated with all the other non-Threads initiated fediverse content, and monetizes it. They are using “not their content” to enhance the desirability of their portal, and certainly placing ads in its vicinity. As with any instance, they can also curate that content to promote their chosen agenda, which is surely in part “increasing engagement.”

We’ve seen how “increasing engagement” has been done by Meta and other companies already: ragebaiting and misinformation. While there is no way to completely prevent this, I want to avoid content that I have created from being used in that way. If there was a way for me to individually defederate from Threads, so that Threads could not see my content, I would turn that switch on in an instant. So far as I know, the only way for my content to be excluded from being viewed via Threads is for the instance my account is on to defederate. I’m not in any way asking for kbin.social to defed from Threads, just noting that that is currently the only functional way to accomplish the stated goal.

I do understand that there are already instances that have done that very thing, and I am certainly able to jump over and use one of those instead. I may do that at some point, but I am pleased with the interface at kbin.social, and developer of kbin’s work. For the moment, I want to watch and see how things play out, becoming more informed before I make a decision about how I interact with the fediverse.

I’m not comparing renting to owning, I’m pointing out that they are different things, and each has an appropriate place. The image in the OP makes a blanket statement implying that all payment equals permanent ownership.

It is certainly true that there are things people pay for that they should have more rights of ownership over, but don’t (even, and maybe especially, if they are led to believe they have ownership rights that they do not).

But even ownership of, for example, my car, does not extend to me the right to reverse engineer my car and build another identical one, and then sell that.

When you enter into a contract, where you pay for a product or service, there are a wide variety of rights you do or don’t receive, depending on the agreement.

Edit: Since your employer pays you for your labor, they own you, right?

That’s why I claim ownership of every hotel room I’ve ever stayed in and every car I’ve ever rented.

I once had some knob trying to argue to me that “god is real” because “the Incas believed the sun was a god, and the sun is real.”