Since email is the common analogy, I would extend that to say that you could be John.Smith@gmail. You might also have John.Smith@outlook. Someone else has John.Smith@yahoo. If you wanted, you could setup a new account John.smith@protonmail, or start your own server and be me@JohnSmith.com
Communities are the same way.
(Not OP)
I miss the Reddit that was destroyed in June. I don't miss the Reddit of now, and won't be going back. But OP is completely right on all of it. Unfortunately, we were all left scrambling for a replacement, and Lemmy has non-trivial barriers to entry for most "normal" people. Sure, those of us that are tech-savvy got through it (and are still dealing with the major bugs and deficiencies), but so much of the old experience just isn't here.
It's not the existence of shitposts and memes like 196; it's the lack of other content. r/HomeImprovement is often cited in articles about the blackout and how big/important it is. Conversely, !homeimprovement@lemmy.world is still just a fraction of the old Reddit community, and discussions are limited and (generally) disappointing. Similar stories about Woodworking, AMA, etc. LegalAdvice (for better or for worse) was one of the biggest subs on Reddit, has just 57 subs on Lemmy. The sub for my IRL city (1 million+ population), which was one of the best sources of local information, might as well not exist here.
There's no way to moderate that content into existence, and there's only so much you can contribute to that content to get it started.
The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it's about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.
But right now, it's entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven't seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.
If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That's fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter's publicly available data.
This should speed up the admins' search for replacements they keep promising!
It's because of the very impassioned speech by then-Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens, where he demonstrated that he clearly had no idea how any of it worked. You could hear the lobbyists in every bit that he parroted, without absorbing it. He also had formed a strong opinion already, despite clearly having just been told how it works.
It's not that it's a bad analogy. It's that it's (somewhat) reductionist, and most famously associated with an idiot.
Boost died for me at 7PM EDT on 6/30, along with the rest of Reddit. Apparently, Reddit was incompetent with disabling everything, so it (along with other 3rd party app) still worked for some people if you were not logged in.
That's pretty likely, given how many have left in the past year, and it's possibly a very big problem for Meta. Apple in their early days infamously asked candidates if they were "virgins". It was not (as Hollywood likes to portray) about their sexual history, but whether they had ever touched or seen IBM's proprietary code. Apple needed to do a clean-room development and implementation of the same thing. They knew IBM would sic the lawyers on them, and they had to prove they did it using nothing but publicly available info.
The article has absolutely no detail on what these trade secrets might be, or if they will be upheld in court, so we can only speculate. But if these really are trade secrets, and Meta poached them, then we could be talking serious damages or even an injunction.
But knowing the courts, this won't actually be decided for years and it won't even matter by then
There are plenty of people that do this, and it seems to be pretty straightforward.
There is a significant risk going forward though- if the undesirables (the ones that currently get larger instances defederated) start doing this in any major way, then the larger instances will block new federation or smaller instances by default. Starting now is actually probably a good move, since you might be grandfathered in when that occurs.
Also, be aware of local laws regarding content you host. You could be liable for illegal content you inadvertantly receive.
It's an interesting move. The only moves are to ban (at least from that sub) all of those users, or to decide that profanity doesn't merit the NSFW tag.
The first would require a lot of work from the admins (either doing the moderating, or replacing mods until they find some that are willing to take orders on this, for free). The second endangers that sweet, sweet advertising money they want so dearly.
Of course, they could try to wait it out, but that seems unlikely. They've already taken extreme action to end the protests.
Telling Nazis to fuck off rarely leads to them actually fucking off, because they're Nazis.
Breitbart on the mainstream, centrist posts. Most of it's way further out there. I have no idea which ones are inauthentic shitposts and which ones are legit. They are way beyond Poe's Law.
But more important is when they show up on other instances. Everything becomes an argument, dragging down everyone and everything they encounter. This also can't be solved by just blocking the communities on EH, it must be blocked at the community's instance or our (the viewer's) home instance.