F O R E V E R

I completely agree with this take, including the “I hope I’m wrong” bit. It just looks… bland? Like it’s relying on the idea of space being expansive and vast and full of… well, everything that exists - but in the end will it just feel like a Bethesda game with space assets subbed in?

Then again I still play No Mans Sky so my desperation to be a space-man is obviously without limit.

I at least succeeded with my partner, so the most private conversations I have are safe in Signal. But unfortunately Meta knows just about every party, dinner, or event I’ve been too for the last ~8 years from having planned it in either Messenger or Instagram. It’s shame we have to choose connection over privacy, and I hope someday someone hits on the magical combination of privacy, UX, and blind luck and makes a service we can use without feeling like a product.

There’s definitely a trust issue. ActivityHub doesn’t fundamentally change that unfortunately - Meta would still see everything I post or say, and can still build a profile on me if my posts are visible in their app. You bring up an interesting thought though - my understanding is that ActivityHub would make migration to other platforms easier… even migrations off first party apps, if a Digg/Reddit/Twitter-style event occurred? Might help prevent some of the tomfoolery we’re seeing now.

Or I’m also naive, I guess we’ll find out.

I genuinely believe this could be successful.

Mastodon STILL has UX issues, and the rest of ActivityHub and the Fediverse are impenetrable to the average person. That will change over time, but in the meantime, I can’t even get people to use Signal for god’s sake, let alone explain which Lemmy instance is best for them.

I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections. If they fold in a Twitter-esque client to Instagram, that I can interact with from Mastodon if I want? That sounds like a really strong value proposition to me, and is the only way your non-techy friends are joining this parade any time soon.

But also, we’ve got to make sure these massive companies don’t snuff out what Lemmy and Mastodon are building. There’s a group of suits somewhere right now thinking of how to monetise this platform, and we need to be prepared for that.

The whole blackout thing is super interesting, and to my knowledge it’s the biggest protest of it’s kind since Reddit hit the mainstream. I can’t imagine it kills Reddit soon though. It’s just the start of a brain-drain that will make Reddit lose relevancy over the next 5 to 10 years, and they’ll wonder where they went wrong. Even I’ll probably keep my alt account there, but the days of actually contributing will end for many.

But also fuck spez ;)

It’s one thing to test a new idea or a UX tweak or similar on a small portion of users - but just turning off a key way to access your service is so just so weird to me. How many of Reddit’s decisions at this point are some version of, “hey, how angry do they get? What can we get away with?”