Holy shit the amount of paranoia in this thread is terrifying. I good y’all are taking care of yourselves out there.

That’s a pretty long-winded way to try to make hot air grow solid.

I don’t disagree with anything you just said, I also couldn’t care less about the business loss it would be for Google/Meta. But I think people’s surprise is not about that, it’s about how this business relationship was potentially actually beneficial for the Canadian news outlets who pushed for this, since a lot of their actual traffic was coming from what Google and Meta had built, whether those Canadian editors like it or not. If that’s the case, then they’re basically shutting down an effort that was providing them free advertising, potentially shooting themselves in the foot.

They also can’t claim that they wouldn’t know it would happen, since that’s what Spain did a while ago, and that’s exactly what happened. If the issue is about reusing copy, some other countries passed laws allowing Google to provide the free advertising by showing users links and titles, but without providing any summary, and Google abided. But the Canadian law here was written to ban even the parts that may be beneficial.

If you personally go straight to news websites, then yeah, there’s no loss for editors from your usage. But the thought here is that a ton of users don’t do it like you do, and the Canadian news outlets that made this law happen are about to suddenly lose all traffic from those users.

Yeah, that’s fair. I’m staying on Lemmy following the same line of thinking; but I cancelled my monthly donation to them, thinking it would sure be swell if they ran out of money and have to transfer the reins of the project to other people, at which point I’d donate again.

And if they don’t and Lemmy just dies because of the lack of funds because of who they are, I’m thinking it’s not the end of the world either, because there’s Kbin to take over that’s awfully similar anyway.

Oh, right. So, they’re Uyghur genocide deniers. And North Korea supporters too apparently. Which… I mean… isn’t much better.

Kbin and Lemmy are both based on ActivityPub, but they don’t use each other.

I don’t think the drama has been only around BeeHaw, the existence of Kbin itself is mostly because of the Lemmy devs being holocaust deniers, believing in “white genocide”, and stuff like that. I also wasn’t convinced at some point until I was pointed at the receipts, see the “Read right here” comment on this post: https://lemmy.world/comment/562635

If you want to see it in action before your instance is on 0.18.0, here’s a hardcoded link to view this post on an instance that’s already on 0.18.0 right now: https://sh.itjust.works/post/374636

I’m sorry for your loss.