Fair enough. I was reaching back to Netflix’s early days where you could get DVD’s of most anything decent even if you couldn’t stream it.

I’m kinda surprised that the article only mentioned convenience and completely skipped rising costs, ad injection, crackdowns on password sharing, and more fees.

The subscriptions cost a shitload more, even if you’re a paid subscriber you still get ads, you have to pay more fees to get rid of ads or watch a program that is either new or the service has decided to charge for, and you can’t share password with anyone outside your household.

It’s not a convenience problem, it’s a money problem.

Ha, I was thinking more serial killer or cannibalism in Chay’s little psychotic universe, but that’ll do.

We don’t talk about that. Chaaay be a little cray cray.

Everyone loves Chay. Haaay, it’s Chaaay.

That looks like great young kids’ bedtime story book art.

Literally cheesy, lol.

Ha, tried another YA novel cover. “Invasion of the hormones”. This is hilarious, it looks like flying testicles.

My argument was that monetary compensation of some form would drive participation, and that participation could take the form of simple things like ads all the way to developers coding lemmy instances to accept ads and other preferred features desired by corporations like user tracking, algorithms to place preferred posts, communities and/or users at the top of views, etc… Make the software free and give instance operators a cut of any revenue, and bam, EEE wins. Way too easy, the burden of running the instances falls on the operator and with some nice EULA wording, probably the liability as well.

Of course, that hypothetical scenario hinges on corporations finding the lemmyverse worthwhile to exploit, which hopefully won’t happen.

If you want corporate control go back to Facebook and Reddit. Seriously. There are places that do what you want already, no need to corrupt this one too.

Did you read what I wrote? Are you just being stubborn about human nature? Don’t insult me by implying I don’t understand this stuff at least at the surface level. All I’m painting is a potential future, and that future is depended on corporations finding the fediverse worth the effort. If they don’t, NBD. If they do, I can assure you they will grind away at what the fediverse is until it’s shaped like what they want, federation be damned. Like I said, maybe you can carve out a corpo-free area, but that depends on the instance operators wanting to put out the effort and money while corps are potentially waving cash in their direction. Humans are shortsighted and greedy.

I’m pretty cynical. I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and enjoy everything from Star Trek, to The Expanse, to William Gibson’s novels. P K Dick, too.

You want to know which futuristic reality they projected is the one in the lead? I can tell you it’s not the gleaming white space stations with hundreds of thousands of humans peacefully engaged in furthering knowledge and exploration.

Nope.

It’s the despotic corporatocracy with the token ineffective government winning. The corporations rule all. Ever read Jennifer Government? Yeah, we’re headed for Gibson’s Sprawl and disparity in a hurry…well, if Climate Change doesn’t get us all first.

If corporations get their hooks into the fediverse it will be like putting out fires. Plenty of people out there willing to sacrifice what the fediverse is for a few bucks. I don’t want Threads/Meta to even get a toehold, that shit’s poison.

Stupid?

Cynical, sure…Pragmatic even, but not stupid. I don’t have rose tinted glasses that so many fediverse adherents seem to have about this platform. I see the corporate world taking what it wants. They may not snatch it up quickly, but they sure as hell can engage in the EEE slow grind and get what they want eventually.

Sure, fight. We might be able to carve out a piece that remains free. But if they want to commercialize it, they will, and there will be plenty of instance owners that will jump on the bandwagon to make $ or just defray costs.

You forgot profit.

If Meta/threads sees a way to cram ads into their instance(s), they will. If they offer money to others to put ads on their instances, they will. If they make rules or other demands of those making money - like no defederating from Meta/Threads, or requiring federating with other corporate instances, they will. On top of that, you’re going to get people drawn into the fediverse, like influencers, political spammers, more bots, and anyone else that follows that type of social media. Coders will start writing corporate-friendly instance code that will allow individuals (like influencers) to spin up profitable instances quickly that tie right into the corporateverse.

EEE will happen. We can argue about defederating from these corporate instances, but it’s going to be a running retreat.

Maybe hyperbolic. Maybe not. If, of course, if meta/threads finds the fediverse profitable.

Do you have the money to enforce those rules? Because meta certainly has the money to get people to profit off what they want.

You will lose. EEE/enshittification will happen. To think otherwise is naive.

Leftmost bottom?

She kinda looks like…”Well it’s not that bad, is it?”

But the US system is so much better because profit.

/s

Billionaire backing.