Interesting. Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I don't see how tech companies stamp us out by lobbying, or how web hosting and cloud services can be restricted based on use case. Seems like the genie is out of the bottle on this thing.
It's interesting, the fakeness in porn is so conspicuous. I wonder if this sense of faking-it-for-money is a component that is actually conditional to viewing pleasure for sadists and misogynists, and maybe it's an indication that there are more people out there with those predilections than we might like to think.
IANAL so I don't know anything about anything. But I think the subtext of this story is one of the little guy getting comically screwed by a bigger player. If the South West Terminal, with capacity for 52000 tonnes of grain, wants to swing their dick on a farmer over 86 tonnes of undelivered grain, they'll find a way to win. Regardless of the law, going after a guy over a thumbs up emoji is audacious, at least.
I expect that in the future, someone in the farmer's position with bigger stakes and more money to play with will bring on a herd of lawyers to throw down a thousand esoteric & byzantine arguments & get a win. Maybe that's unfounded pessimism, I don't know. You just don't seem to hear stories about rich people taking Ls like this.
Interesting thoughts. I suppose Meta will collect what they want to collect, it's what they do, and this is all public discussion, anyone can collect it for any reason. And I don't doubt that their involvement in the fediverse is secretly nefarious in one way or another.
Where I think our current situation is different from the Google/XMPP thing, is that, a bunch of platforms are going down the tubes really quickly and lots of people are looking for the next thing all at the same time. It gives a lot of room for a good platform like this one to gain ground rapidly. As far as I'm concerned, if for example instagram federated, and I could browse some good feeds outside of meta's app & privacy permissions hell, that would be a plus for me. If they subsequently pulled what Google did with XMPP and suddenly backed out, I wouldn't react by moving to instagram exclusively and I can't really see why any user would make such a move.
Lol, digg is owned by a company literally called BuySellAdsdotcom, Inc. Like, hey I wonder what that company's north star is?