Major reason not to buy ebooks from amazon: you can't lend, give, exchange, sell them and you may lose all of them if you anger the right people. They are not yours, you are not buying them, you merely paid for conditioned access to them.
I can give you a perfect example of car brain that even applies to people who try not to drive too much:
The other day I saw a dude complaining that they keep putting zebra crossings at roundabout exits and he insisted that this was just done to use pedestrians to slow down roundabout exits, but that what these city planners were doing was dangerous, since more than once he had almost run over a pedestrian or stopped suddenly and endangered cars behind him. :/
Then somebody actually asked: "Ok, so where the fuck do you suggest that the zebra crossings be placed for the people actually walking along the streets that cross the roundabout in multiple directions? Do you expect them to walk 20m further?"
sudden paradigm shift and some drivers actually became aware of car brain.
I was gonna say that I never expected or wanted lemmy/mastodon to become mainstream anyway, far from it. And like dual-booting linux and windows, there are just some things I won't abdicate in favour of convenience or having more followers/software or being on a platform with more market power.
But you know what, it's a spectrum, from the volunteer/libre-heavy to the hideous proprietary tyrannies:
??? > FOSS > wikipedia > reddit > google > microsoft > twitter > facebook > ???
Maybe if we are able to accommodate a large fraction of the mod community of reddit and let the flexibility of federated diversity and "3rd-party apps" flourish against facebook's top-down approach we might create a wikipedia-like oasis...
But probably not, because there is too much money to make in appmaking rather than written content creation.
But why do the current lemmy instances have to die if facebook decides to make ActivityPub+goldextra? We'll just stay on our branch, maybe lose a few users who should know better. Facebook isn't even making use of ActivityPub's federation anyway, which is why we are here.
I'm actually afraid that they won't defederate at some point but find some way to track the activities of the federated servers.
I think you need to graph-traverse the "Instances" link at the bottom of the page for all communities to map it all. I'm actually working on this as we speak.
Major reason not to buy ebooks from amazon: you can't lend, give, exchange, sell them and you may lose all of them if you anger the right people. They are not yours, you are not buying them, you merely paid for conditioned access to them.