It’s like boiling a crab - people don’t realize how much they’re getting shafted if you enshittify slowly enough. And frankly, I fully predict that it’ll continue to get worse. Social media execs have proven themselves to be brazen enough (and dumb enough) to so openly exploit their userbase

To be clear, the Fediverse doesn’t mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that’s mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn’t want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn’t want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?

So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will

Basically, if you’re on Lemmy (which you are), you’re only going to see Reddit-like content

I think that’s a fun concept. I love dealing with the mechanism of realistic hypotheticals.

If I were to answer, I think it’s straight impossible for all of social media to not be funded through advertisements. There must be, to some degree, some site that clings on. But we can modify the prompt to say “the majority of social media will not be funded by advertisements.” In this case, I feel like there are a couple potential mechanisms, of varying likeliness:

• people collectively become more aware of their browsing habits and start using non-advertised sites (highly unlikely)
• the government steps in and collectivizes major social media sites (highly unlikely)
• the Fediverse, or some other alternative, becomes so popular that it becomes the primary social media site (not likely, but not impossible)
• social media sites shift their business structure so that users have to pay for social media usage, but in return they get no ads (actually possible with a not-insignificant chance of this actually occurring)
• social media sites find some other way of exploiting users that is currently considered either implausible (not likely, but I wouldn’t put this one out of the realm of possibility)

Because Threads didn’t federate. It turns out when they said that they’ll federate, they actually meant “some time in the undisclosed future.” And then Threads lost a lot of that initial marketing hype so everyone forgot about it.

Apparently Meta is currently testing federation for Threads, though? The problem about Threads federating isn’t resolved, to be entirely clear. It was merely that everyone, Meta included, just decided to kick the can down the road and think about the issue later.

Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don’t trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse