I don't understand what the image is depicting exactly, there's one black person in the picture and she's sitting there while that guy is about to drip something on the head of the woman next to her?

Is it a picture of white people bullying a group for having a black friend?

Nothing good will come of federating with meta, the fediverse should simply stay out of their reach and realize whatever potential it may have.

I think there might be another way to hurt it though that this article doesn't seem to mention. Funnily enough, it's also a theme of an asterix and obelix comic book, which the introduction referenced. This way would be monetization. Threads might try to "help" the fediverse by feeding the bigger instances money, therefore the hosts of the instances would be more open to negotiations with meta and accepting of their policies.

I will compare this to YouTube which started paying all it's big creators until they became dependent on the platform for a living and then started slowly implementing more and more rules that limit their freedom of expression. Remember how much PewDiePie used to swear in his getting over it videos? In another "pew news" or whatever it was called video I happened to watch he directly mentioned that he censors himself because he isn't going to put his job on the line just to say "fuck". Profit invites creators to comply with YouTube's regulations even if they aren't enforced violently always.

The same pattern was used in the asterix comic I mention above. Ceasar decides to open a building complex almost next to the problematic for him village and so the residents flood the markets and are shocked at the low prices compared to Rome. As a result, the villagers start increasing prices and advertising their goods and services, neglecting their previous morals and ethos. In the end, however, the Romans lose again after (panoramix, I think?) makes them realize how much separation this has caused them, living only for their business. As a result they kick the Romans out of their village, once again united, and Caesar's plans fail.

I think both these stories could serve as a potential warning to anyone who might consider selling themselves out if meta adopts such a policy.

If they didn't why would they develop tools to federate? It's obvious that the threads project was sped up significantly following musk's obliteration of Twitter, so they wouldn't go out of their way to implement such a feature if they didn't have a very specific reason for it.

A company's goal is maximization of profit, so don't assume they intend anything else. The activitypub userbase is too small to be a significant addition to their userbase but in this way they can destroy it before it escapes their control. They don't take risks. Mastodon could seriously compete with threads and it's gaining popularity. If one more big boom happens it might be too late to stop the fediverse from competing with meta in the most cost efficient way possible. Do not be lured in by the false sense of security, meta wants us to help maximize their profit. We aren't doing that right now so Meta wants to stop us (or limit us, whatever they deem more profitable)

To me it seems weird that YouTuber is doing this at all. They should know that they can't win, I doubt their CEO is that incompetent. Especially after all this time of wasted effort on their side to overpower a very small fraction of users who actually block ads online. Could it be to draw attention from something else that's actually more worrying?

Because as an AdBlock user, since I bothered configuring them and using only ublock I haven't had almost any popups and my experience, especially now on the later stages, is exactly like it was before the ban.

I can't help but think there's more to this because they can't be wasting resources, further damage their reputation and risk absolute monopoly on video platforms for a fruitless endeavor.

Even if YouTube isn't profitable by itself, which, given the user data harvesting and the ads I definitely doubt, google still is. I'd appreciate any takes on this because it's been bugging me for a while now.

Yes but how many losses?

NONONONONONONO

WHAT WILL I TITLE MY POSTS NOW

My guy these are sex trafficking victims, they don't get the "choice" you're mentioning. They were either kidnapped or scammed into doing this, meaning forced. But you're probably a troll so I won't elaborate lol.

The people who run said shadier environments usually support banning sex work so they can get cheaper labour force :). Capitalism runs even behind the scenes.

This looks like an ad

With enough propaganda, any of them.

I'm not American so I'm happy to hear that the veterans know why they went thru it at least.