JoJo

You're going to have to explain why an entitled rich woman abusing her power is equivalent to the driver here.

It is a wholly disproportionate consequence. Chasing him down and yelling at him in the street might have been a reasonable course of action. Chasing him down and asking him how badly the gig employer was treating him to make him feel this way would be much better. Dismantling his livelihood just because you have so much power it doesn't even occur to you to avoid abusing it, when his poverty is what makes your own wealth possible, is vicious entitlement.

Did you see that house? They're beneficiaries of the structure 'we' have created. They absolutely should have enough self-awareness to take it on the chin.

I did watch the video. He was having a bad day. And the wealthy person he took it out on took it upon themselves to dismantle his life. That's the whole point of being wealthy, after all. You don't have to give a shit about anyone but yourself. And there will be ordinary Joes cheering you on because this world is absolutely fucked.

I get the impulse, for sure. It's upsetting, you want revenge. But would you stop to consider whether the injury to your feelings is really worth throwing someone out of work? I mean, if it's some tax-avoiding, worker-exploiting, obscenely highly paid executive, go for it. Bury them if you get the chance. But punishing a very low wage gig worker to make yourself feel better, and tightening the iron grip of the afore-mentioned executives by snitching on them? Be the better person and feel good about it.

I don't think it's that people want a monolithic platform? They just want a network that is big enough to provide enough new, high quality content to keep them amused/informed.

Back in the day this was a constant struggle for bulletin boards (the best of which were focused on a particular hobby or area of interest). Too small and the place was dead, often with a lot of poor quality content with no one around to correct it. Too big and it became impossible to moderate, and difficult to keep track of who was reliable and who was full of shit, and difficult to find what you were interested in if a handful of threads took off and pushed everything else out of sight.

After BBs mostly died, I used Twitter and Reddit as newsfeeds with informed commentary attached, plus bonus cute animal content. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin aren't (yet) big enough to fulfill that role. Not enough of the commenters and sites I want to read stuff from are on it, and there are too few users to rely on to fill the gap.

At work, we want to switch. We use Mastodon and Twitter atm. But there are not (yet) enough specialists in our field in the fediverse for it to work. A small fediverse just can't do the job we need it to do. (FWIW we're public sector researchers; this is about disseminating research and finding collaborators, not advertising products.)

There is no one size fits all and neither should there be. The danger is that the small-is-good parts of the fediverse disappear because the content devolves to endless bitching about what other instances should have done and why won't they all agree with us (even though we're not a monolith, honest).

And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.

It won't kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.

There isn't a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.

Probably not unethical if the people they were stolen from can prove they didn't sell them (which may be a big if for some hacked accounts) or are definitely rich enough not to be adversely effected in any meaningful way regardless. But it seems you wouldn't be able to use them for anything that requires ID anyway:

Obviously, stolen airline miles aren’t usually spent on actual airfare or hotel bookings—purchases that require proof of ID.

But many reward programs allow account holders to redeem points at local retailers, often through gift cards. In March last year, for example, Air Miles alerted members that points stolen from members were used to buy products from participating retailers. Members aren’t required to enter a password or PIN number when spending points, and retail staff often don’t ask for an ID. Due to the lack of verification, frequent flyer miles have become a profitable target for hackers and thieves. And because most of us don’t use or check our frequent flyer accounts very often, the theft can go unnoticed for months.

That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.

This is what happened with XMPP:

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. ...

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it's the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they're already on it anyway).

That's not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.

But you can't stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don't need us at all.

The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there's a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance ... it's hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.

Oh

More sense than what? No one's claimed they learned it from us and we've only just found out about it, so we didn't learn it from them.