It's easier to get involved on smaller communities about stuff that interest you than big, generic communities. I hope now that lemmy is starting to grow more and more, we'll see more of the former.

The issue with that take is that everyone that uses social media knows that they spy on you. The people that care are already trying to use alternatives.

Honestly, users that can't be bothered to check and subscribe to all knitting communities (which is really easy) will be snatched away from the first corporate alternative with more polish.

Open source applications rarely beat corporate ones in polish and ease of use; these aren't the battles we have to fight. Lemmy is already near identical to reddit once you sign up and subscribe to the communities that interest you.

I never argued that Google helped XMPP, I’m arguing that it isn’t applicable to the “extend, embrace, extinguish” crap that people keep parroting

I can agree to that. Does Facebook want to join the fediverse with the sole reason to kill it? Probably not -- but the fediverse stands to gain little to nothing from their involvement, so we should be as vigilant as possible with them. If the result from that is that some people end up believing that Meta's out to EEE the fediverse then eh, whatever.

I don’t have plans to visit other instances, manage multiple credentials. Either I get to see it all from one place. Or these other places will functionally but exist for me.

You don't have to manage multiple credentials. You can visit and subscribe to /c/knitting on another instance as long as your instance is not blocking it, or blocked by it.

If I subscribe to /c/knitting I mean I want every /c/knitting on every single instance in existence.

Would you? The point of having multiple instances is that /c/knitting@gaming.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by gaming, /c/knitting@memes.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by memes and so on. You may not want all of them. This is a bit of a stretched argument, but I want to showcase an example where fragmenting communities on a per server basis can be useful.

I know that for generic communities or hobbies it can be annoying, but it isn't that hard to find the largest /c/knitting and subscribe to that, no matter the instance. Reddit's centralized approach is more convenient, but we've seen the price we have to pay for that convenience.

You're missing the point of having a decentralized network. As long as people are allowed to spin up their own instance, duplicate communities are bound to exist. You can view both of them or choose which one you prefer.

I don't know of any backup program that integrates with a file manager. For my use case (plug in an external hard drive and backup stuff to it once a week) FreeFileSync works fine. rclone is a popular CLI program to automatically backup your files on a cloud service. With some searching, it seems that it also provides a web GUI and can be used with OneDrive, so I suppose that's worth checking.

As for defender services, I have no idea, but from my understanding most people don't use an antivirus on Linux.

Agree with everything except the tracking; that's got to be built into it since day one, unless they didn't manage to hit their harvesting goals by the stated release date, which they want to hit in order to compete with twitter asap

Make the switch to Linux! Even if you need proprietary software for your work, you can dualboot and use a linux distro for your personal use.

Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the "How to kill decentralized networks" post that's been going around lately puts it nicely:

One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.

My understanding is a little shaky too. I suppose companies are incentivized to target infinite growth so they can get the most money out of the stocks they hold, but this is a culture and greed thing, not a hard requirement.

I know about dividends but decided to keep the comment simple. Aren't dividends relevant only in utility and holding companies?