When I remember back to the early 80s, me a single digit aged human with my first Commodore 64 and a cassette tape drive, to being a high school aged kid and helping my buddies install their extended memory set chip by chip to get them to 1mb of ram, to way in the future where I type this comment on a mobile phone touch screen capable of unfathomable high resolution graphics and speed is still a surreal feeling.

I grew up and grew old with computers and it’s wild to imagine a life without and a world without them nearly 50 years later.

perhaps they also can see it and feel it directly but have decided its largely unavoidable, something they are largely unable to change, and just give up? sometimes i think it’s as much about lack of control and weariness as much as it is about apathy.

are they wrong though? let’s say in this hypothetical situation, i have never ever had a social media account. Checkmate privacy invaders!

except wait, i have family, like my mother, who have my name and phone number saved in their phone, probably my birthday and address too if they fill out the contact card completely, which they’ve given permission to facebook to access to “find other friends”, and boom, now i have an entry in a data tracking database without ever opting in myself (i know this is a core privacy argument, not arguing that).

so how is the average person wrong in the “they already have it anyway” camp?

If you want to see only high effort content only join appropriate communities, it’s as easy as that. To justify blthr block because it will taint the space is just a bad arguments in my eyes.

couldn’t agree more. there’s certainly plenty of ‘content’ on the fediverse that i have absolutely zero interest in and would rather not see - but i can control that pretty easily even as a new user so I don’t see the value in gatekeeping. maybe I dont care about linux but maybe both the linux user and I both like catswithjobs - that’s the beauty of diversity, of finding common bonds amidst the differences and celebrating together.

i left reddit not because i have to use their shitty app - i left because it was completely crystal clear that the management attitude toward users is extremely toxic and hateful. Basically repeatedly gave the community the finger, and continues to do so. It’s their playground, but i dont have to go where i feel unwanted.