cakeistheanswer

Probably true. it's the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.

No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.

This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.

Advertisers gonna advertise.

From a lifetime of small message boards It's easier to drive engagement in smaller groups. If there's less overall exhaustion with the basics in any niche, splitting the new members is a good way to keep differentiated material. Also growing communities can end up boxing out their regulars. It might be hard to get started, but the small communities tend to be resilient at some point, they just migrate service to service.

Most of the people who moved here were especially motivated to overcome the barriers to entry to, so I'm not sure the numbers still hold.

One can hope, even as far back as Usenet the overall general self interest is always a pile-driver to the platform.

I think we'll all be around to find out. Whether they end up federated with everyone else is up for debate, but the products still follow the eyeballs.

Advertisers especially are going to note how high engagement is compared to the other platforms, the rest will take care of itself eventually.

I was able to get everywhere til I bumped into a nsfw redirect. I'm not sure there was synchronized expiry, but I cant imagine the incentive to work to hard winding down.

It's a well founded worry.

Activitypub represents the lowest dev entry costs and as a bonus it comes with an audience. If Facebook is standing up a cheap competitor just to take advantage the barrier to entry is miniscule.

Given the trouble some users have noted deleting content (erasing also kills your Instagram account), it might also be a play to deprecate a duplicate platform under their control.

Isn't the key operating word here business?

With no advertising on the line and no operations currently in place operating at anything but a loss there isn't a commercial interest at stake.

Understandable, and yet if nobody contributes upvotes out of the same concern you end up with nothing standing out in your feed to come comment on. Kind of circular.

On the other hand having an upvote actually attached to your (and I actually mean your handle here) name would likely give it credibility in a weird sense. There's much less incentive to blindly upvote if it essentially shows what you saw like a slug trail, but if you're selectively giving oxygen to the best of what you see then that trail is valuable to others who value you. It's a functional change from competing to push things for their own sake.

Im old! I come from an era where there was no such thing as OPSEC as soon as you interact with another party you cant personally name. For every consumer that was the phone company, or literally right out the door. If you transmit (login credentials, personal info, search queries) the expectation is somewhere, someone or something is logging it. Not even maliciously all the time either, sometimes I got to some of this out of boredom. The corporate Internet just kind of acts like a middle man, because that same problem never went away, just siloed into companies.

Until we get to a future like Transmetropolitan where the expectation is your online presence has some dirty laundry (and hopefully leave out the other stuff), all the bits/bytes, not just upvotes, you transmit should have a limited expectation of privacy. This is just the best/latest reminder because every hack is the same problem, only the company has incentive to keep it quiet so it doesn't hit their bottom line.

This is super interesting to me.

I think you're right in that the user base has the same expectations despite a huge change in the model. But it's going to be the same on any server, your circle of trust now has to include your instance owner everywhere on the fediverse.

In general there's no expectation you can delete every email you ever sent either, just your local copies. Most of what you see here is similar with some new attached protocols (votes, markdown etc)

I'm sure we'll see some evolution, but the entire infrastructure is a call back to when a single service wasn't directly linked to a single business, and it shouldn't be treated like one.

In other words I'm not sure the concession isn't the price you pay to not have reddit/twitter in charge. Because any other architecture that had the convenience of having a single point to delete from is also going to be a single point of failure.

Fully expected to be buried since I'm late to the party.

That's really only half of it, there is no real erasure possible when everyone's holding a cached copy. Personally... I kind of like it, I don't hold any value to the words I contribute here as long as they're for everyone.

But everything and everyone is living in concentric glass houses here.

I mean the Internet and Ann landers get awkward questions all the time.

First there was beans, and they were upvoted, and the threadiverse saw that it was good?

Like legitimately no rhyme or reason to elevate beans above any other thing.