When the shoe fits, start wearing it. PRC is an authoritarian state led by a dictator and his cronies.

We need a scraper rather than an API caller.

Frankly, you're incorrect. It's an incredible pain in the neck to try and deal with the Fediverse beyond local content. Without better community merging or centralization, browsing instances becomes no different than dealing with having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes, or talking on forums before we had tabbed browsing. It's incredibly annoying, and pushes people right back to centralized systems.

It's a fundamental question about society: which is more prevalent, fear or laziness? They had no reason to move until their program stopped working. Now, it's not going to work anymore. But I don't believe we'll see a massive adoption wave. People are still confused about the nature of the Fediverse, and they're too scared by their ignorance to get over it and bite the bullet.

Unfortunately, those that do take the plunge will find that most Fediverse client software is in beta, or less than fully functional. Laziness will keep them away. Fear will push them to other monolithic platforms. So my thought is that it's going to drive traffic to Meta's properties for the time being, at least at this time.

It's because very suddenly, users of RIF and Apollo are going to be locked out of Reddit, and people think they'll migrate here, rather than going to the official Reddit mobile software (as a RedReader user, I've switched over), or going to Facebook/Instagram.

There's already porn in the fediverse. I don't see a problem with it existing, but it's always bothered me when porn and social media get mixed. That's not necessarily because of prudishness or shame, but rather the fact that social media often employs dark patterns of addiction, and porn addiction can become very real, very quickly. I think we need to be careful about it, and I think there should be an onus on platforms as well as producers to help protect the vulnerable against addiction and the downward spiral.

Wow...

I'm sure users will step forward if they care. Otherwise, it's just a campaign optimization at work. Limit the breadth of organic content to deepen the brand-friendly content and push more paid media into the feed.

As a former user of Prodigy, all I ever wanted was for the Sears catalog to be accessible on there, as it was dying. They could have done exactly what Amazon did, but with the brand power of Sears. Home delivery was a solved problem for them - hell, Sears' Home Delivery could literally deliver homes! Look it up, you will find houses still standing that were prefabbed and delivered. Yes, we damn well should have shut up and bought things. I say this having been one of the world champs of the Prodigy Carmen Sandiego - one of the kids they wanted to just shut up. If my family could have bought everything from Sears (& K-Mart) from Prodigy, we would have!

Sell me a thing worth buying and I'll shut up and buy it. Sell me snow in the winter, I'll just shut up and walk away.

As for LJ, yeah, a lot of English speaking people had no idea about it. I saw it when I looked up the company buying LJ. Many of my friends at the time moved to IJ & DJ. I wasn't hurt, I wasn't affected directly, so I stayed until I got bored.

That's how I feel about social media - I'm there till it bores me. Give me something worth buying, I'll shut up and buy it.

I'm absolutely of the mindset that all non-comment interactions should be totally anonymous. I'm disincentivized to react to content, positively or (especially) negatively, because I expect that the Reddit-style behavior of trawling a user's history if you disagree with them is commonplace. We need full anonymity - not just pseudonymity.

They don't even care about logins anymore. They care about advertising impressions, sponsored post engagements, and ad conversions. Marketers on the platform don't care about how many users they have, they care about impressions, clicks, and conversions. That's all it comes down to - are you providing value by trackably converting on an ad, buying Reddit Gold, or subscribing to Premium? If not, why are you being a drain on server resources that could be used to benefit a paying customer?

This is absolutely the thing to note about it. No matter how you feel about the situation, your health must come first, then your family's, then that of your friends, and so on. Work outward in concentric circles when you are ready to do so, but always be sure that your health (both mental and physical) is being supported and maintained.

Don't let Reddit or any other company or group drag you down.