If I set my search engine to DDG and Firefox has a deal with Google, then my browser is going to change my search engine to Google? Of course not. When you install Firefox it defaults to Google. In the past when Firefox had a deal with Yahoo it defaulted to Yahoo.
Are you suggesting that is incorrect because all of that happened?
Google leverages their monopoly search position to push people towards Chrome, using messages that, to lay people, imply a lot of websites won't work correctly unless they install Chrome. This is the most charitable reading, assuming they don't deliberately impede compatibility with third party browsers.
You used to be able to do this, but e-mail has been required for some time.
Over on Lemmy, it is the instance operator's choice whether or not to require e-mail, but most instances currently do as a measure to mitigate bot signups.
This was also my experience when I tried to register a custom domain. The only thing that worked for me was using a Gmail account that I had used with other, older, accounts.
In theory the regulators, as part of the government, serve the will of the people. But the state under capitalism serves no one but the massive corporations which these regulators are meant to govern. So we end up with fossil fuel guys running the EPA and Verizon lawyers running the FCC.
There is no one to regulate the regulators because the state in its entirety is isolated from accountability to the public.
The capitalist class on the other hand is famously innocent of thuggery. It's not like the established socioeconomic relations in Korea were incubated under a military dictatorship or anything.
You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary.
Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship.
The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.
It's a mistake to think echo chambers are a phenomenon which only take place on the political extremes. Reddit itself is an echo chamber of tepid liberal orthodoxy and American exceptionalism, moderated by a former member of the Atlantic Council. A fish doesn't recognize the water it swims in.
Redditors might call a place like Hexbear an echo chamber for instance, but it wasn't the members of Hexbear who chose to isolate themselves. Reddit made that decision by banning them.
While this is true, I feel like there really is a difference between modern online communities and the ones that existed in the older era, before the so-called web 2.0 era. You can't escape bias at all, that should be any person's educated perspective, but there is a difference in degree that is sharper both on reddit and facebook groups and the like.
Ironically, twitter (which does skew left wing at least in some places), while having its host of issues, has a much lower degree of echo chamber-ness because there are no groups, everyone is thrown in a pot together. It does have the cancel mobs and all that but an echo chamber it is not, which at least proves "echo chamber" isn't the default final state of any social media platform.
Counterpoint: If you are a member of an oppressed group and the leaders of your community punish people for calling you slurs, it makes it pretty obvious that they do, in fact, have your interests on their mind.
The point of federation is autonomy. Communities can decide on their own how they would like to conduct themselves, instead of having Steve Huffman or Mark Zuckerburg write the rules for them. Several alternative social media websites, including instances of Lemmy, have actually sprung up explicitly because of censorship they experienced on the hegemonic corporate platforms.
Hexbear for instance was born from the ashes of r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the most active (per capita) communities on Reddit. The Reddit staff pulled the plug in the midst of a generational political crisis and mass civil unrest and didn't even have the nerve to cite a single, specific infraction. And now, the community is free to discuss subversive political topics without having to worry about advertiser boycotts applying pressure to have their community shut down.
This idea that free speech starts and ends with the ability to use slurs is among the most idiotic brainworms which persists among libertarians. Nobody in power gives a fuck if you spend your time spitting on people who have even less power than you do. They only care if you can articulate a political program which threatens their ability to rule.
It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place.
While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.
A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."
The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).
Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.
