Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
I am a dev. The example I gave was meant to be a POV, but in hindsight this was not clear. Because of this, I cannot meaningfully answer your question.
This topic still deserves genuine and transparent research. I have no doubt there are people already working on this, but I have not seen any notable results.
[OFF-TOPIC] To be completely frank with you, I’ve think that our communities (federation and open-source) are too splintered. Not in the sense of head count (this is good) but in terms of duplicating and abandoning work (this is bad). We really need a way to get a community-pulse on what is generally needed/wanted. I am not sure what the solution for this is, but I know there is one.
Agreed. I’ll try asking our UX people and see what they’d expect/want.
I think that’s a feature, not a bug, at least in the abstract sense.
For example, I think federation is a terrible solution to the general problem we’re trying to solve here. It requires too much hosting costs for everyone to self-host, requires too much trust in the admin to properly horizontally scale, and is inherently complex, which scares people away (and some of that complexity seeps through to the user).
However, a lot of people think it’s the bees knees, hence why we have Mastodon and Lemmy. I still think it’s poorly designed for scale, so my projects aren’t federated, but I certainly appreciate the people working on it in the meantime (I see it as a stopgap), and I do contribute fixes here and there (I was somewhat active in fixing bugs when I came to Lemmy).
This is tricky because there is no one community. It’s better managed as separate communities instead of one large FOSS community.
So maybe projects just need a better way to gather feedback from users other than issue trackers. Projects really should do more polls.