Enshittification had already been largely discussed here.

I saw users minimizing the aberrant business practices of Meta and doubting their role in assisting in genocide.

My point was to highlight how unethical and horrendous Meta itself is.

For the Meta apologists, I have a reality check for you:

Threads was immediately subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]

Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3] They also fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch. [1]

As already established, Meta also assisted in genocide! [4]

Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [5], [6]

This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information.[7] Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads…

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. [8] Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design. [9]

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/

Edit: In case you need more citations for why Meta is a worthless and unethical company…

I was disappointed he didn’t end up with double gold, but double silver was still very impressive, especially given the size difference of his final 3 opponents.

I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.

Yeah lemmy.ml has gotten worse with tankies, but it’s no where near as bad as the others. And I still want to see some lemmy.ml communities (tech, gaming).

But unless it’s changed with some of the recent updates, blocking instances as a user (on lemmy) only blocks posts from the instance but still allows interaction with their users in comments of posts. It’s different for kbin and mastodon.

I don’t want the annoyance of arguing with tankies from their main instances. I’d rather be defederated.

Also, why go back to lemm.ee and do that when I don’t need to on feddit.de? That seems kind of silly in the first place.

I’m happy on feddit.de, as they are really only defederated from the tankies and Threads.

I left L.W when they federated with Threads and tried lemm.ee, but dealing with the tankies is so annoying I had to find another new home and settled for feddit.de.

I was really unhappy with that change in the last update as well…

I couldn’t find a setting to change it back to the actual numbers, but I think that should absolutely be an option in settings.

As you said, the numbers provide a lot more information regarding engagement/views/how controversial a comment/post is.

Some people may feel it’s frivolous, but I’m considering a new app if it remains a percentage.

Jerboa recently introduced it, but you can turn it off in settings.

Such a terrible feature imo…

I have a key fob faraday cage/pouch keychain to prevent people from being able to dupe my key fob’s signal.

It takes time and experience to distinguish what makes something good or bad or just average.

Well maybe some day you’ll have enough experience to distinguish good games. You’re clearly not there just yet.

I liked it more than Ratchet and Clank too, but Jack and Daxter was my jam.

I replayed the original just a few years ago and it still holds up so well…

It’s different on other platforms (like mastodon) but on lemmy, it only blocks posts from the blocked instance. Users from Threads would still be interacting in comments with the user who blocks their instance.

Regardless, I believe they should be defederated by instance admins on ethical grounds. Meta/FB have run unethical, uninformed experiments on their users, including purposefully inducing depression in their users.

The fact that Meta has assisted in genocide should be grounds for defederation by instances which claim to protect and care about their users.

Meta’s platforms have also played a key role in radicalizing users, and they purposefully marketed Threads to far-right extremists.

Here’s my argument with citations

There’s also good arguments to defederate and block them from the fedivers based on EEE.

If an instance’s admins claim they care about protecting their users and providing a safe, healthy community but are federated with Threads, then they are either uninformed or liars.

Nah, it’s on topic to the comment discussing userbase and donations. I’m not alone in leaving due to Threads either.

Just chiming in to say they lost my donations and me as a user for federating with Threads. I’m over on feddit.de now because they’re the only instance I could find defederated from Threads and the tankies.

Edit: Have to edit this comment because I’m laughing at all of the butthurt users who are downvoting me because they don’t like my personal decision.

This is exactly the route I’ve been thinking about heading!

I’ve still got some songs (including horrendously misattributed artists/titles) from limewire in my music library, all these years later.

Eh, that only goes so far. Any appeal to their original content is eroded by their practices surrounding streaming packages.

I canceled when they bumped their price up a lot, and had it structured to where the HD streaming was paired with the package for a bunch of devices. It’s bullshit that they don’t allow HD streaming with a package with only 1 or 2 devices.

I am also deterred by their password sharing crackdown, because I used to share subscription payments with my brother in another household.

I read that they’re planning on doing away with the commercial free subscription, and I have no interest to resubscribe if it’s a payment plus commercial model.

The convince of having quality original content in one place is nullified by their sleazy bullshit practices. There’s no way that their “convince” outweighs the little effort it takes to pirate the content IMO.

Steam and Netflix are the sole reasons I stopped pirating as a teenager/young adult.

I canceled Netflix long ago at this point and have been on the brink of going back to pirating films/TV. Too many streaming services… it’s just like TV packages before Netflix disrupted the model.