A good essay, but I find it ironic that the author used "finding a recipe" as an example of the old web working well when recipe blogs are frequently the top example cited when someone is talking about SEO slop in the pre-AI web.
I disagree that having a variety of UIs is a bad thing. I wouldn't want every instance to look like dbzero! It also highlights that Lemmy is not a single platform, it's a federation of them. Heck even reddit has two UIs!
This makes sense to me if you consider the type of person who is likely to leave reddit is also less likely to be just a passive consumer of content. I imagine in ten years time we'll have two kinds of "social" media: decentralized activitypub discussion-based networks, and commercial entertainment platforms that might have comments but little else in the way of connecting.
Another stat I like to highlight is the moderator-to-user ratio on Lemmy (and the rest of the Fediverse) is similarly around 10x more improved.
When i said "designed for discussion" I meant that Mastodon posts are displayed in chronological order instead of sorted by engagement.
I agree that would result in a commercial failure, but Mastodon is not commercial, not does it have an obligation to grow. So it seems to be working very well for the people who do use it.
What does "fail" mean? Twitter's algorithm is for entertainment. Mastodon is designed for discussion. Both can exist just fine, but you can't have a platform that does both well.
The topic of this post is that a company is charging money for altering what was previously not a restricted feature. That violates the third rule in the sidebar.
I agree OP has a right to be upset, but this post has nothing to do with privacy.
There's no need to get upset. If you truly are having difficulty understanding my feelings on the topic and are asking in good faith, I'll explain it one more time:
The topic of this post is that a company is charging money for it's services. That violates the third rule in the sidebar.
Whatever mine or your feelings on the topic, it has nothing to do with privacy.
It's empty venting, and the topic is not about privacy in a meaningful capacity, it's about a business model.
Allowing venting/drama/gossip threads in a community over time will push out the people (like myself) who care about the actual community topic. And when those people are gone what's left is a cesspit.
I understand what you're saying, but what you want (conformity of UIs) is just not possible to enforce on a decentralized network.