This is not cynicism. It's realism. Corporations (especially Meta) have no heart, soul, or care for any externalities to the generation of profit.
The best case is that they will slowly ease into things by contributing to FOSS repos/projects while silently developing proprietary versions or extensions which wall it off.
This makes me shudder from my time running forums.
OOB vbulletin was notoriously bad at fending off sql injections, and required CONSTANT monitoring, tweaking, or disabling of basic features to keep the Syrian Liberation Army (as one particular example) from pwning an admin account.
Several teenagers-in-adult-bodies use the incredibly minor inconvenience of green bubbles as class posturing - which is the kind of mindset that I will go out of my way to avoid.
Or, for a small sum, you can either strengthen or wholly dissolve your relationship. A net win either way.
I’m a bitter old man who dislikes inline gifs in the comments
I've waffled on this issue over the last 25 years, but agree that the option to show/block should still exist.
First I was against it.
Mostly because it was change - cluttering my once pristine BBSs
Then I enjoyed it.
Because it added some liveliness to the threads I read, and because I was in a smaller collective of folks that knew how to do it without being annoying.
Then I was against it again.
Because the forums/boards because overstuffed with people shitposting ONLY animated gifs.
edit:
I'm one of the more whimsical dudes I know and I don't mind disagreement so I'm pretty open to whatever - but please tell me why jubjub.wingdang is something you want to see several hundred times a day.
Am I missing something? Does wefwef actually mean something, or is it just typical techbrand nonsense? We have gone PAST Idiocracy at this point.
There's a group of well-meaning folks (more than I am comfortable with) who want EVERYONE to come over from reddit. A subset of those have decided that the best way to do this is by mirroring content.
THAT IS THE LAST THING I WANT ON ANY TIMELINE.
I came here to GTFO of a forum aggregator that became a corpo-coopted hellscape of shitposts, bots, and shouting into the void; and I sure as hell don't want anyone to bring that shit over here.
A miniscule fraction of users on reddit post, comment, or even help to rank content in any valuable way. The rest detract from any sense of community, clutter conversations.
They need not be placated, invited, or made to feel at home here.
Nah, I'm fully aware of what FOSS is and does - but nothing in this entropic universe is permanent.
FOSS has gone private before (RedHat, etc) due to profit motive. I'm not sure I could resist several million dollars to keep it that way.