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Influencer, because that term has pretty much become synonymous with ‘grifter’ at this point as most ‘influencers’ are trying to run a grift of some kind.

Last time I thought Matrix ran on ActivityPub like the rest of the Fediverse, though.

I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities.

• There’s actually been some recent attempts to do exactly that, eg. zine communities have been getting big on ATproto recently, as well as art/craft communities in general.

Google’s the main contributor to closing the web off, they even straight-up admitted to that a few months ago and tried to DRM the web with WEI, but that failed with massive backlash.

Boohoo, the open web is broken…

• You caused it, MF’ers…

But yeah, walled gardens like Discord, Google, Meta, and Twitter certainly aren’t helping matters, and even some of the alternatives got some controversy of their own, eg. Bsky recently censoring people on their main PDS, although given ATproto is an open protocol, there’s no one and nothing stopping you from setting up an account on a third-party PDS like Blacksky or Northsky, or hosting your own, for example.

Apart from that, more open and decentralized/self-hostable alternatives need to crop up and fast, and we already have ATProto, ActivityPub/the Fediverse, PeerSuite, XMPP, and even LBRY/Odysee.

Assuming mirroring isn’t borked by that aforementioned DRM.

At least Meta straight-up admitted to grifting people, Google has yet to do so.

I laughed way harder than I should’ve at that.

Age-gated vids have been login-walled for a while now, non-age-gated stuff is still viewable while logged out and through alt front-ends, for now.

I won’t put it past Google to fully login-wall YT at some point in the future though, or even worse, put DRM on it so that it’s only watchable through Chrome on Android, or Chrome or Edge on Windows, and non-Android and non-Windows OSes, and non-Chrome/Edge browsers are blocked, as well as alt front-ends and downloaders, and even mirroring to competing platforms.

Invidious mainly, and that doesn’t use any YT accounts, it’s the equivalent of watching YT logged out.

Also, Grayjay lets you log in through it but that probably doesn’t bypass the age check if you’re KYC’d.

If you’re an active creator yourself though or even if you only have a few vids you made years ago that are still up, I’d set up PeerTube, Odysee, or both, and post those there while you still can, though.

One more reason to use an alt front-end, and clear/disable your watch/view history and not log into YT directly anymore, at least while you still can.

Linux of course, it’s been headlining lately in terms of improvements particularly on the gaming front, but also FreeBSD based on how quickly it’s been moving in terms of improvements on the general desktop front, FreeBSD is at the point where it’s a viable third option on the desktop if you’re not gaming, although that’s assuming you’re running its CURRENT branch since that’s where the latest development happens.

You know things are getting bad when two governments are on your case about your patent trolling, Nintendo.