It’s wrong to be dismissive. Hiding something shameful is now, and will likely always be, a critical element of privacy. I agree that it’s not the whole story (or perhaps even the most important part) but it’s certainly the part that people many people spend the most time thinking about.

Yeah, that’s a pretty strong line, plus you could keep going with ever more disturbing questions.

I mean, nothing is stopping you creating or joining an instance of lemmy that has a charter like that? You could very easily never federate the corpo instances. Astroturfing could still be an issue, but it’s likely you’d never get big enough for that to be an issue.

imagines himself as an old man, picking at his ears “Ay? Wassat? Post quality beans?” Shrugging, and humbling under my breath while going to the cupboard to take a photo… “Not sure how that’ll help, but I’ll do me best.”

I think the critical question is not so much how many users it lost, but how many contributing users? Given the majority of Reddit users are lurkers, you could easily lose half the content by losing only the top 5% of contributing users…