Yeah, before Starlink I was paying $150/month for 15 Mbps down, usually getting half of that or less, and it was transmitted via radio so it always stopped working when it rained. It was barely usable, but too important to stop paying for.

Now I pay a little less and get 100-150 Mbps down, and the rain usually doesn't affect it. Latency is better too.

And I'm just 20 minutes from a fairly large city in the US. There are a lot of areas with less service than I had.

Musk can eat shit, and I hate giving him money, but Starlink has made a really big difference.

You're right to compare it to the other sites. It looks like people are dropping social media in general, and a lot of reddit's losses could be caused by that instead of the admins pissing people off.

That said, I think all of those losses are pretty huge, considering it's only a month. Extrapolate those numbers to a year and they become more like 10-30% depending on the site, which is pretty devastating.

If those are steady losses, some of those platforms may not exist in 5 years. I think that's a crazy thought.

But yeah, I agree with you, Reddit didn't lose that much more than the other sites, so I don't think this shows a giant exodus just because of because of the api changes.

EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.

The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.

Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.

Why do you think a large corporation would just share their content to people who aren't viewing their ads?

They're not just being generous. Corporations are not benevolent. So what are they expecting to get from it?

Here's the answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I can't see why they would. Apple doesn't care about you, but they probably do care about retaliation from the French government.

It's not easier for them, and once there's enough people to matter then it's too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.

that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation

Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising.

They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they're going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.

People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they're irrelevant.

We know what Meta's goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn't matter. We shouldn't give them the opportunity to try anything.

We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.

Trump removes inspector general overseeing $2 trillion coronavirus relief package days after he was appointed: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-relief-trump-removes-inspector-general-overseeing-2-trillion-package.html

Inspectors general warn that Trump administration is blocking scrutiny of coronavirus rescue programs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector-general-oversight-mnuchin-cares-act/

Allowing bad actors to advertise themselves is highlighting them. Banning them and deleting their communities is the opposite of highlighting them.

Unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to support Nvidia on Linux unless you have a large enough team to test each of their GPUs individually and find workarounds for all of the bugs. Their Linux drivers are really bad.

The bigger projects have been able do that, but if it's a relatively new project with only a handful of people working on it, and it's not used on the steam deck, there's basically no chance it'll support Nvidia.