I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.

And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.

And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.

And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.

Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.

I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.

Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”

I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.

“I showed up to the potluck with nothing even though I was told that I needed to bring something and expected to get the same things that everyone who brought something did, AiTA?”