I see a lot of comments from bootlickers on how the protests are dumb and stupid and dont work and engagement metrics are still holding but the quality of posts and comments has noticeably depreciated imo. So much so that whenever I visit the site Im actually shocked at how bad it is.
And I hate to say it but it made the perfect opener for the thing that Zuckerberg is talking about. I mean the Zucc himself is literally talking about federated communities right after the other giant social media companies started running theirs terribly.
At the very least, people will hear about the tech elsewhere now and maybe that will drive traffic to actual federated communities.
I’m kind of tired of people farming human interactions and profiting off of making our communities miserable. I’d donate a lot to lemmy if I had money just to not have to be the product anymore.
One of the problems in starting any user-driven site is how to seed it with content when you have no users. Freely available federated community content effectively removes this problem. Anyone looking to build a New Reddit or whatever dystopian hellhole Meta is aiming for – they’d be fools not to try to exploit this. Imagine launching a new product that has nothing in it, versus one where you have, at launch, thousands of already active users and a body of interesting content, and it costs you nothing extra. Throw your megacorp weight around to position yourself as the de facto way to access that stuff, sprinkle in a little embrace-extend-extinguish, job’s done.
This is not to be taken as a tacit approval of the strategy, which I personally find repulsive. I’m beyond sick of the commercialization of everything under the sun and the weaponization of data.