All your points are reasonable, but I don’t think the masterplan requires anyone but him. He’s gone mask off as far as being ok with or even promoting hate speech of various flavors, and twitter was increasingly hostile to those sorts of folks until he took over. Unbanning Trump was damn near the first thing he did.

He strikes me absolutely as childish enough and rich enough that (incorporating also your “he doesn’t really want it” point) buying it, doing everything he can to run it into the ground, then folding or divesting it (who would want it now?) when he thinks he’s destroyed it as deeply as he can.

Which is why I find it really hard to believe it’s not intentional even if I don’t understand the end game.

Delicately balanced is one thing. Making repeated decisions that my technophobe father could see are stupid is another.

I flipped from “wow he’s really mismanaging this” to “wow he’s trying to kill it” about 2 months ago, and have become nothing but more convinced since then.

Thanks for posting this. It’s hard not to become the “but muh firefish” guy every time a thread like this pops up.

Solves nearly every complaint I’ve seen about the Mastodon interface, has features I haven’t even seen folks ask for (I like the “antennas” feature a lot), federated with Mastodon, and will guide you through importing everyone you follow or who follows you - literally migrating your Mastodon account over in just a couple clicks.

I’m not anti-Mastodon whatsoever, but for the folks who find it klunky, Firefish is the answer for sure.

Fair enough. I didn’t really intend to be arguing with you so much as spring-boarding off your point. 🙂

I see it less about preventing than about sending a clear “DO NOT WANT” message.

I’ve been around since the prevailing attitude across all common internet services was anti-corporate, anti-commercialism. You sound like maybe you have too. We lost that battle. It’d be nice to win this one, even if in a way that matters only to Fediverse users. I know at the end of the day Meta won’t care, and it won’t stop them from slurping up our data.

I still think there is value to the DO NOT WANT message, and when Musk or MS try the same thing, I hope we send the same message to them. Let there be one tiny corner of the internet that isn’t monetized and enshittified to death. Let the users who are happy to use those companies’ platforms use those companies platforms.

I get that this is tangential to your complaint here, and I get it. I don’t care what peoples’ reasons are though. Every instance should support the fedipact, and when Meta finally starts federating I’ll leave my comfy kbin.social home 30 minutes later if it doesn’t.

I hope each new revelation convinces more instance owners to do so, and more users to ask their instance owners to do so.

Everybody, please understand what defederating means. It will not stop the defederated instance from getting the data. It just means you don’t pull theirs.

I’m OK with that. If I wanted to talk to facebook users I’d be on facebook.