Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.

Agreed... Feels like everyone is falling for this hook, line, and sinker.

The goal is to get people back on Reddit, doesn't matter what you're doing. For how many people are still on Reddit complaining, it clearly doesn't matter that much to people.

That's because ublock.org is not related to uBO. uBlock is the original project that got compromised.

1. Isn't pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
2. Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn't matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it's more than just click the icon, it's too much.
3. If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

Threads never released in the EU in the first place, so this absolutely is not the reason for lowered engagement.

In an indirect way it could be though - not having the entirety of the EU on Threads is a huge non-starter for many people, as many of their favourite influencers, celebrities, companies, etc will be from the EU who were never able to get on it.

You're 100% wrong on the details.

A few things:

1. Lemmy runs on an open protocol which cannot be "bought", known as ActivityPub. All platforms that use ActivityPub can theoretically interact and federate with Lemmy. This means that if something like lemmy.world was bought, we don't have to "move away from it", we just spin up another instance and then federate with it while the other instance doesn't have to deal with corporate things like ads.
2. Lemmy is Free and Open Source Software licensed under a version of the GPL. This means that it can never be fully restricted, and if corporate interests were to theoretically "buy" the current maintainers, it can be forked to a version without corporate meddling, which can then federate and interact with all the current instances anyway, due to how ActivityPub works.
3. There's a lot of instances. You can't buy the entire fediverse as you will have people with principles.

Now don't get me wrong, they can absolutely meddle, but not purely through money or hostile takeovers, due to the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. No matter what, the Fediverse will always exist as it is, all the huge platforms can do is try to make it so people don't want to use the Fediverse and move to their platforms instead.

To try and give an analogy, it would be like a company trying to "buy the web" - they literally cannot. Of course, we do have some huge players who control a lot of the web and attempt to dictate standards for everyone else, but there is no one iron fist that rules over everything, and there's many small players and communities all over the place.

It's whatever you want it to be.

In general, people on the fediverse are pretty chill and not hateful, but there are instances full of genocide deniers or literal white supremacists.

Thing is though, each instance moderates differently and your experience varies depending on where you are.

For example, beehaw.org (not sure if it's back up) is a very heavily moderated and curated space, and most people there tend to be from marginalised groups. They will federate and defederate accordingly so that experience is preserved.

On the other hand, you have instances such as exploding heads which are "free speech" which attracts the kind of people you expect, and your interactions across the fediverse will follow suit.

Your instance and moderation defines your experience on the fediverse, not the platform.

Literally any of them.

All you do is install your drivers if using Nvidia, then just install your games, whether native packages, flatpak, Steam, Lutris, or whatever.

I just run Debian 12 and everything through Lutris or native. Used to run Steam through Flatpak which also worked perfectly, but don't play any games on Steam anymore.

Ultimately, it's because the concerns of privacy are simply too far removed from people, or they trust certain entities more than others.

For example, if your next door neighbour knows all your browsing history, people would be bothered, but people are not bothered if Google knows as it feels they would have no direct effect on their life, whereas your next door neighbour might.

This can be easily seen in the whole discussion regarding privacy on Mastodon.

A lot of people refuse to use Mastodon over Twitter, because "Mastodon admins can see my DMs", even though Twitter absolutely could as well (Twitter apparently has encrypted DMs since May 2023 though). The reason for this is they see a Mastodon admin as someone who could potentially have an effect on their digital life, whereas they trust Twitter not to do anything with the data since they're a big corporation who has nothing to do with their personal life.

Unless it is an effect they can directly observe (or imagine to occur), people simply don't care. This applies to almost all discussions around the big picture, such as things like climate change or unions, or whatever.

Whether we like it or not, people absolutely trust corporations.

The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.

Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.

As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it's very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.

They're just different softwares that communicate over ActivityPub. They're both link aggregators, so they'll be similar in functionality.

For an easy comparison using established names: One is Reddit, one is Digg, but they can communicate with each other and show each other the same content, and you can just pick which one you want to use.

There will be more differences than this, however I haven't really used kbin much to know what makes it different to Lemmy fully.

The Fediverse allows people to just choose the platforms they prefer, and then talk to everyone else on the Fediverse regardless, instead of having to create multiple accounts all over the place to talk to specific people.

I suspect support will be axed eventually - chances are many people will flock to these exempt apps to still get their 3rd party client fix, and that will put them on the radar for Reddit to find a way to justify pulling the rug out under them too (e.g. "Our app is now accessible!").

It's a shame that Reddit went like this.