Making more money back than they paid.

It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren’t suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.

Lots of reasons:

• It’s bigger and less fragmented. More content, more diversity, more activity, and it’s all in one easy place.
• No extra conceptual hurdles to overcome like “what is an instance” or “which instance do I join”.
• Network effect. See point 1. Unless you are some kind of FOSS enthusiast or a refugee of every other social media platform due to your vulgar, sexual, illegal, and/or politically extreme interests, your friends, followed creators, and other people of interest have a far higher chance of being on BlueSky than the Fediverse.
• An actual algorithm. Many people who jump to the Fediverse hate it, but a silent majority of casual users actively want it. Meticulously curating your own feed is not a boon to them, it is a chore.

A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.

Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.

It’s one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It’s another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.

Yes.

I noticed my authenticator app (KeePassXC) offers the ability to customize the TOTP parameters (SHA function, time step, code size). But no combination of settings seems to produce a valid code.

I assume Lemmy uses the suggested defaults in the RFC 6238 standard?

Connect, Sync, and Boost all told me to go kick rocks.

Evidently, whatever happened, it doesn’t seem to be an issue with your platform.

I seem to have been screwed over by TOTP.

Hearing that this update was supposed to make borking your account harder to do when setting it up, I enabled it. Put the secret in my authenticator app, got my six digit code, and away I went.

Now, a few days later, having changed nothing on my end, Lemmy.ml won’t accept my TOTP code. My session token on desktop is expired so I can’t remove it now.

Currently my only lifeline to this account is my logged in session in Voyager, which, as far as I can tell, cannot access the TOTP setting. (Or any profile setting, for that matter… am I just stupid?)

No email to recover from, either. That’s on me, I guess. Ugh.

Not sure what my recourse is, if I even have any.

Thank you for the suggestion of Voyager, I have installed it and it looks quite nice!

Creators of Lemmy, owners of this instance, and creators of the Jerboa app are all the same people. As I understand it, Jerboa won’t be getting an update until they’re happy with the stability of the update to Lemmy itself. Lemmy is getting all the focus first. Also, no sense in pushing a client update for a server update that itself is not finished.

Getting really annoyed at that error toast in Jerboa, though, not gonna lie. And not being able to post on mobile. At least I can still read posts and comments, though. Hopefully the patch will release soon.

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, “gold armor trimming, 10k”