Republicans will do it now anyway. Their only regret at this point is that they hadn't thought of it before. The GOP has become so baldfaced uncouth, they don't care anymore if their dirty tricks are performed in broad daylight. Watch trump has taught them there is (so far) little to no repercussions for breaking "tradition" or "precedence".
When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax...), or yet another that will sell out it's host country's citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).
But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you'd need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don't like the idea of lemmy, and it'll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.
I work in enterprise IT, and whenever I see new announcements from the C-suite offices that include the words "streamline" and "merging", I can tell things are going to get worse, way worse.
I shouldn't be surprised anymore that execs truly believe they have the perfect solutions, all of which actually make things worse, way worse. No difference to them, they'll just fall up anyway.
Trump cultists are like maybe 30% of the republicans, making them 15% of the population at best.
It doesn't matter if the vast majority of republicans aren't trump cultists, it only matters that the vast majority of republicans will vote for him when they're alone in that voting booth.
That makes the vast majority of republicans willing (and some eager) to bring a fucking fascist, and all that he stands for, back into power. This is an existential threat to democracy in the US, not even being hyperbolic.
The old(?) Ricola cough drops commercials. They were huge in the '90s, not sure about since then though (I stopped watching tv a little after that period).
A universal claim only takes one case to disprove, and I'll be that case: you're wrong. I actually seek out the pay services and cut out the "free" ones.
My real complaint is when the huge companies offer a paid plan, but then still try to double dip and abuse my data and I. So I leave for the smaller guys who have an actual reputation to protect and so have garnered some trust. The hard part are things like google street view, or youtube, where competition is way behind due to the sheer inertia that incumbents have (e.g., creators using youtube due to the huge potential audience).
Other thing hard to ditch for me is android, as I really don't like how tightly locked down apple's walled garden is - not being able to run real firefox with my choice of extensions is a showstopper for any mobile platform.
The front fell off.