this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Digital Fiefdom (aka walled-garden) Required

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people are forced into a walled-garden to carry out a public transaction or essential task of some kind. As governments impose a digital transformation policy with no analog refuge, people are forced into becoming serfs in a technofeudal system that is subservient to lords (Microsoft, Cloudflare, Google, etc).

Well-known walled gardens include (but are not limited to):

(note I do not say X or Meta above because I do not recognize or promote obnoxious and detrimental trademarks)

¹It’s somewhat unlikely that a gov would impose Github, but it is listed as an example because some govs do have git services. E.g. the EU has a public-facing self-hosted git instance.

Somewhat related communities:

founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
2
(metapost) Just created this group 1hr ago and already have 35 subscribers (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am certain this community is not instantly popular. Even in the fediverse most people are fine with walled-gardens (we know this from Lemmy World). So just pointing out it’s interesting that 35 bots instantly monitor new communities as soon as they are created.

(BTW: “metapost” in the subject means it’s an off-topic post about the community itself. It’s not a reference to that shitty corp that has hijacked a generic word for commercial exploitation)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I subscribed to your community because it showed up in Trending (I suppose as soon as a community is created, it shows up there) and it's a subject I'm interested in. I'm not the only one who thinks walled gardens are terrible, so I don't see why you wouldn't get 35 legit subscribers like me right off the bat. And SDF being a tiny instance, you can expect maybe 50 subscribers immediately if you create a community around a subject of particular interest.

Also, I was waiting for you to post an introduction before posting something myself, just so I wouldn't steal your initial thunder 🙂 Maybe others were waiting too, making it look like it was all bots and no real people.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I appreciate the feedback. Maybe they are mostly human then. I did not realise there was a trending community view or timeline.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You are here 🙂

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I am just now seeing your image because I normally have images disabled. So when I 1st saw your msg, I only saw “you are here” and didn’t understand what you were conveying. Colon needed! Thought you were saying i would be a human subscriber.

Wow, that’s a clean inbox you keep!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It's the community federation bot.

https://lemmy-federate.com/