‘Despite’ seems out of place here. Those 30M users didn’t sign up ‘despite’ the flaws, they give no fucks about how flawed their social media is.
Like me saying I eat bacon sandwiches despite the health consequences.
100% this. For everyone that takes their online privacy and freedom very seriously, there are literal millions of others who couldn’t give less of a fuck and proudly parrot the “if you have nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about” bullshit, like they’re some enlightened cunt atop their own tower who conveniently ignores the consequences of every company that experiences a major data breach.
These people are the reason the internet has devolved as hard as it has, and it makes me sick to know there’s nothing that can be done to stop things from only getting worse - the masses enable the surveillance capitalist machine, and what’s worse is that they’ve become convinced they need it to survive. Meta pushing their fucking nose into places it isn’t welcome, like the fediverse, just further proved it to me. These big tech firms will not stop until they own a piece of every free region of the internet, and they know that no matter how vocal their opponents are, that the lobotomized fuckwits that make up the bulk of their userbase will just lap up anything they put out.
Social media was a fucking huge mistake.
Not to sound like a naïve, brain dead optimist but maybe this is our chance to draw our line in the sand. If Threads falls on its face, it will likely serve as precedence for other companies who think they can use the fediverse for their own gain, no?
As Louis Rossmann says, “never go to war with the internet because you will lose”. I’d like to think that the people who make that quote possible are all migrating or have migrated to the fediverse.
despite not knowing what it means, in this context, it means whatever affords me the chance to nitpick. in essence, despite lacking any authority to make such a decision, and the absence of any motivation to the contrary, i define words how i like. the result is that, despite my efforts, my arguments are incoherent. however, in lieu of better alternatives, despite, which heretofore had usually be defined such that it always was in reference to spiting a particular thing.
