Warning: This is a rant.
I don’t really know how to describe it but the content isn’t quite where reddit had been for me. Also the comments are kind of weird at times, like they type of person here doesn’t quite seem as ‘normal’ as what I’m used to from reddit.
There’s a lot more open source and privacy focused people and conversations. A lot of people seem to hate on big tech and big companies in a sort of toxic-ish feeling way to me (not to say the other relationship isn’t toxic… just saying). Random conversations go into: “omg your privacy is lost cause you used a Google service.” Then we have the ‘if we don’t defederate with Meta the world ends’ conversations. I personally would like to see what Meta does in the fediverse… maybe it will make it more normalized…idk. Then the: “if your app isn’t open source its awful and terrible for the world” people.
Like that stuff is all fine, but it just isn’t quite my cup of tea.
These things remind me of that one person in my comp sci classes in college who I just couldn’t stand talking to. He would try to make you feel like an idiot by trying to sound all self righteous and smart. (Honestly he would fail and would generally look like a dingus).
The bulk of the content that gets comments seem to be mostly meme atm. At least on all (7/10 of the current top for me are memes). I like my memes, but would like some more breadth/depth.
Like I hope Lemmy continues to grow and hope it gets better, but it leaves me missing reddit at the moment.
In a perfect world I wish reddit corp wasn’t such assholes and this whole thing didn’t happen the way it did.
I’m completely skipping the UI and stuff not being as familiar and the various outages/bugs/etc since that’s to be expected with something at this stage.
Please don’t hate me :) Just sharing my unpopular opinion. Though I genuinely wonder if others feel the same way.
/Rant
To start with, I don’t think privacy is that important. I think that most open source end-products aren’t good and they are only made better when money gets involved.
It makes more sense when we start talking about privacy in concrete forms. It’s about not giving any entity more information than it really needs in order to perform the service they claim to provide. For example, imagine how much better credit cards would be if the number was randomly generated, only valid for a single purchase and only the credit card company knew your name and address. Credit card scams would mostly be dead in the water and card readers would be rendered useless.
It’s not like it doesn’t make sense though. It makes sense that a credit card works the way it does because real-time authorization isn’t always available, and because there is a lot of legacy/backwards compatibility going on. If you wanted to “fix” credit cards you would get rid of them completely and switch to an identity service that allowed you to “federate” your identity with a lender’s service.
It sounds great, but in practice getting all of the ancillary parts working with each other is tough. Look how long Apple Pay (one of the better implementations of a better credit card) has been around and there are still a lot of places that don’t accept it.
Thinking about privacy as a 1:1 exchange with a service is already thinking two steps behind. Services have been using your info to create targeted ads since the beginning of capitalism. It really stepped up their game when computers and databases got involved, and as the internet became more prolific it got even more precise.
We’re at a point where your info isn’t even being used to target you. It’s valuable on its own.
And that’s the trade. You trade something of value to a service so that you can use their service.
Privacy is not important because we lost control of it a long time ago. It will take an act of Congress (in the US) to make it better, and there’s so much money involved that no one wants to tackle it head on.
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