Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

It should be pointed out that the author of this article had a private meeting with Meta regarding Threads and signed a NDA. He is also the head of a company that receives funding based on the popularity of the Mastodon software. There may or may not be deals we don't know about, but he is certainly not an unbiased party.

Meta's business is monitoring and using online social networks to manipulate human behavior. Their massive userbase will cause Threads content and users to dominate instances that federate with them. It's more than just "no like".

That's why I suggested Revanced with "disable recommendations" patches. It's still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

"Suddenly"? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the microsoft-edge:// protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.

Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of "niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos" and became the internet's general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it's a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.

They used to display a bar in the top right of the screen that was "percentage of daily server costs that are covered by Reddit Gold purchases today" and I remember them always hitting the goal. What other costs (besides staff) were they losing so much money on?

Worse, Reddit implements a "vote fuzzing" algorithm where the upvote count can't be determined reliably. The degree of fuzzing is worse for accounts that are considered untrustworthy based on device fingerprinting, like accounts using the old desktop site and accounts using a VPN.

I don't have a lot of knowledge about the technical details of these frontends and I'm probably using the incorrect terminology, but this is mostly an empty threat because

The only way Youtube could [restrict access to Invidious/Piped for good] is by making a Google account required to watch videos. Logged out users on Youtube’s official services like its website and mobile app currently use the same API endpoints these frontends use, so breaking those endpoints would disable its actual services for users without an account as well. You’ll notice that you cannot perform any logged in actions with a Google account on these frontends, and that’s because the frontends only use endpoints that don’t require authentication like watching videos and reading comments. This is the same reason why Twitter hasn’t shut down Nitter (the read-only privacy frontend for Twitter) yet, even though they would really want to.

Invidious/Piped do not use the official developer API provided by Youtube, so they can argue that they're not bound by its TOS. There is the concern that Google can implement severe rate limiting per IP to disable proxies or they'll try to make their unauthenticated API private, but people will probably reverse engineer it.

Nope, not at all. All products and services inevitably kill themselves when they prioritize growth against providing a high-quality service. Infinite growth is impossible and when the service's growth hits its natural limit, it will introduce quality setbacks to reach the profit goals. I'll miss the contributors on Reddit who made its communities great, but I also know these communities and their users will survive without Reddit. As for Reddit the corporation itself...

Please give Lemmy some more time to develop. Until the Reddit API announcements this week, it only had 2 hobbyist developers contributing to it at a slow rate because of its small userbase.

Content can appear slightly different between instances because of how posts are retrieved with federation. In the threads you linked, it's likely that the older comment doesn't appear on beehaw.org because it was posted before beehaw.org federated with lemmy.pineapplemachine.com. Comments that were posted before two instances federate with each other are not synced between the instances. This prevents small instances federating with big ones like lemmy.ml from being bombarded by thousands of comment requests.

The problem with links to remote communities not converting to links on the home server and the confusing federation process are also being worked on, but again, Lemmy (and Kbin)'s contributors are a few unpaid developers. They can't be expected to push production-quality Reddit features instantly.

Yeah no, this "America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened" circlejerk isn't constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their "celebrity drama show" attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn't deny our own problems.

I don't think Mullvad's port forwarding decision can be compared to Reddit's greed. They were getting in trouble with law enforcement for providing tunnels to illegal websites, so they had to either identify those customers or stop port forwarding if they didn't want to get the entire company shut down.