I guess I didn't account for climate change getting quite that bad

I think of 70 like a C "average" in school 🙂

Yeah that's a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.

Yeah I don't see how it's possible to provide that service for free, and I'd be willing to pay for YouTube premium if they didn't treat their creators like crap. The creators that do well on YouTube are the worst because they play the clickbait bullshit algorithm game and all the creators I like that put out high quality content have a hard time making a living

I wouldn't mind paying a subscription for video if I knew the money actually went to the creators, but YouTube is so anti creator that I don't want them taking a cut.

They also wanted control over the user base, so they could do more intrusive bullshit to push more ads onto users. With the fediverse there's no monopoly on the platform so no one instance can get full control and abuse their power. With Reddit the only choice was to either submit or leave completely. With Lemmy all you need to do is swap instances.

Of course, but the important part is you have choice and instances will keep each other in check because you can always switch. With a centralized system like Reddit there's only one provider and if you don't use them you're locked out of the system entirely. This gives them a monopoly on the platform and the power to do anti user bullshit.

Email is also a protocol with distributed servers and compared to that I think each fediverse instance has far less lock in. With email I can switch providers but it's a big hassle to have to change all my accounts and tell people to use the new address and set up forwarding etc. With my Lemmy account I don't really care that much about my user history since it's all anonymous anyways and it's not connected to anything that's central to my life so if I have to switch instances it's not a big deal. It would be nice to have some kind of account linking to show that the different instance accounts belong to the same person, and that should definitely be possible to implement, but honestly it's not even that big of a deal to me.

"see? Despite limiting access we actually gained users"

Reading posts? 600 would go by very quickly and 6000 could be scrolled through by a power user pretty easily which sucks for a paid account.

Before Reddit there was digg and the users left for Reddit because digg was the one pulling shenanigans back then. Reddit definitely had competition even back then.