Anyone who uses that platform is an absolute fucking zucker.

Irrelevant. See above.

I was under the mistaken impression that we were talking about billions of humans. But I see now that you have forgotten about them because you are only interested in Meta, and not the actual humans using meta.

Those billions of humans can still be free to come use the Fediverse through non-Meta instances. Nobody’s forgetting about them; just rejecting Meta’s ability to exploit those people as they interact with our platforms and infrastructure. You are attempting to co-opt the language of inclusivity here. Not cool.

Agreed. I think it’s more that we have been fooled on a superficial level into thinking that online interactions have filled the void (we’re on “social media” after all). So we still recognize that there’s something profound missing from our lives, but what that thing actually is has become kind of obfuscated. The dilemma then becomes whether to 1. blame technology, or 2. blame ourselves individually (“there must just be something wrong with me”). And either way it leads away from the radical solution of rebuilding those local, deep connections with our communities.

No, there aren’t. So called “socialist” or “communist” governments of countries are 100% capitalist. Capitalism is defined by the relations of production, not what a government or political party calls itself.

I agree with the first part. I completely fail to see how the analogy at the end applies. Capitalists and their corporations lobby the government to pass legislation that directly fucks the economy to make it worse for working-class people who use it (and, in fact, depend on it for their basic survival). So it’s much, much more like Reddit where people have to use the one corporate system that exploits and oppresses them than like someone developing a piece of FOSS software that other people can use independently. In fact, if you try to build a separate economy, the state’s violent enforcers (police and/or military, depending on the context) will come in and abuse and murder you and tear apart your independent economy and force people back into the fold.

Today, it is manifested more as an overlord whose primary capacity is to spy, intrude and take your personal information in order that they might gain from it.

In other words, it’s not so much technology that’s the problem, but capitalism.

I think it’s both that and not having real community ties. We don’t form close associations with each other like back when we had town events, neighborhood gatherings, people belonged to more clubs, recreational groups, labor unions, etc.

I wonder if there was an attempt to ask people about television, too.

We’d probably be willing to view ads if the experience wasn’t literally jarring.

Not me, sorry. Fuck ads. I’ve been ad-free for like a decade, and I’m not interested in regressing.

Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…