Joining is immediate, where some Lemmy instances require manual approval even now.

The main page comes off as more approachable and familiar. They also have a ton of local communities (or “Magazines”) so people can do a lot even without the Federation. I find the Microblog stuff somewhat confusing, I think because it doesn’t have much of a UI built around it so it is less familiar than Mastodon. It is fairly centralized though, in the sense that there aren’t that many kbin instances out there.

They do share significantly more OS code than Microsoft, and I think their usage and ownership of CUPS is probably why printer support has gotten better on Linux. I think they could share significantly more, especially enabling third party distributions of Darwin again, but I also find that few people seem to be that aware of what they do share and just assume they don’t.

On the iOS I should be able to toggle a Developer Mode, click through a warning about being out of support, and break my stuff if I want to. They should encourage the tinkerers.

Mobile Safari has supported content blockers for a few years now.

How does anti-privacy fit in there, and what mainstream alternatives are better?

The most popular one is !linux@lemmy.ml

I think the Fediverse stuff is just a way of showing how open they are and differentiating themselves from twitter.

Twitter is doing stupid things but normal people find Mastodon confusing. I think Meta may be on to something here that appeals to normal people, and conveniently they can connect to the mastodon community too. Those are also the people who Meta will profit from.

I don’t think it’s a great thing, but in some ways it may benefit the rest of the Mastodon / Fediverse community if normal people are made somewhat more comfortable.