Just FYI; Twitter and Reddit had API usage available free of charge for more than a decade too.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Asklemmy
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I cannot possibly fathom how no one seems to catch on to bait and switch. At this point I'm just like "well duh" 🤷♂️
Wow this question is all over the place. I want to call out the privacy bit though. The fediverse is NOT private. You are anonymous, and really pseudo anonymous. Everything you post here is shared with anyone listening though. There are guidelines for how to implement the protocol, but they are not rules. Things like deletes do not have to be honored. Any gov agency can spin up an instance and listen.
We can act like we're anonymous, but unless your hosting your own somewhere far off with no logs and zero way to trace it back to you, you're still open. Open web means open, it's what we want. The open web means no single entity can shut down the whole of the fediverse. The flip side is that you are also out there in the open.
I'd bet good money that a skilled malicious actor could find out exactly who you or I am within a single day. Most people don't even use anonymous email addresses, and any admin log showing their email address, combined with an IP address, would make tracking then down trivial.
I personally use a double-hop VPN to avoid this but I don’t think that’s necessarily scalable to all users or a valid suggestion for the non-technical among us.
I used to have a VPN subscription, but most of the places I really wanted to block just blocked me instead. Lots of important services didn't work, and it was a constant pain. So I just let the subscription expire when it ran out.
I use Tailscale with an exit node in my home country and another in Switzerland. Most my traffic goes to Switzerland, but some of it exits locally as websites block other countries. I’d rather it still pass through a VPN rather than my home IP address.
It’s mostly painless, the only website outright blocking VPNs is Reddit (which I don’t care about), but I block most other social media companies and Google properties so I’m not concerned about them.
This is what keeps me from rolling my own instance for personal use. I would need to buy a domain (linked to me) to communicate with anyone else.
It would be nice to be able to spin up an instance on i2p or Tor without still needing access to the “normal” web, but I don’t think everyone’s going to hop onto pure i2p unless it comes built in to apps.
It depends entirely on the tech stack it's hosted on. If it's hosted on an elastic server then it can support more people than there are in the world.