Comprehension skills are severely lacking in a significant number of Americans. We know it based on the typical adult American reading level being so pathetically low. We know it from the interactions we see and have online with other Americans.
I firmly believe that comprehension gap is why people go hunting for perceived slights. Everywhere they turn is an opportunity for a new fight.
And it seems even worse with teens if we take Tiktok into account. The adults there aren’t much better. It is all really an indictment of the American education system.
Lemmy’s few hurdles are seemingly enough to keep these people out (for the most part). There also isn’t the critical mass of people to spark that mob mentality, at least that’s how I feel about it. People here are mostly chill overall and it truly reminds me of Reddit 15+ years ago.
That is inevitably going to change, for the worse, as apps refine the sign up and usage processes. That is inevitably going to change as bad actors, like Meta, are allowed to federate and push their low quality into our spaces along with advertisements disguised as posts and comments. We all know this is going to happen; threads will be used to run influence campaigns. That’s what happens with all of their properties, and with Reddit.
And people influential in Lemmy are signing NDAs with bad actors to allow it to happen.
Excellent post, and it is truly heartbreaking stuff. We know Eugen signed an NDA with Meta which just seals the deal for me given the other refusals to answer basic questions. I think he is probably a person who is finding validation for something he’s worked on for a very long time, and Meta is blinding him. But that’s what they do. They are emotional manipulators by trade.
This is exactly what happened with RCS. Sure, it is an open standard. But Google EEE’d it by adding proprietary functionality using their near unlimited budget and influence, then built it all around their own proprietary middleware, like Jive, to lock out others. Some of the most popular messaging apps, including Signal, had been begging Google for RCS access for years. Google refuses, because they firmly control it now. Only a handful of partners get to access the supposedly “open” standard which Google has co-opted. Sure, you could pour resources into the old, unmaintained RCS standard from over a decade ago. Before Google essentially killed it by moving proprietary and snuffing it out. But then it wouldn’t work with Google’s RCS, and Google’s RCS is what people know as RCS at this point.
Meta will do the same thing with ActivityPub specifically, and decentralized social media in general. They will EEE their way to the finish line. They will wall it all off and prevent account portability and cross-communication outside of a preferred partner network. I could see them walling it off to the Meta-owned properties as they seek ways to further tie Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp together under a common protocol which they’ve EEE’d.