also don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization

I mean, you're fooling yourself if you don't believe Lemmy has been scrapped by a thousand crawlers by now.

I'm more paranoid about how many accounts are bots than about some data aggregator getting my dumbshit hot takes as training data.

Dw, the corpos are using bots to scrape and categorize your thoughts and comments anyway.

Coming here for discussion and meme dopamine, Lemmy still has that intact. Reddit has killed it with bots, ads, and some heavy duty corporate lean on things.

r/castiron, dominated by Lodge Corpo as one example. Other “suggestions”, too early in the day to recall more names right now, are in a parrot circle of replies for brands, as above.

You can’t trust it as much, which is why, in part, people are here instead. More old, old Reddit feels, you know, before it became cool and was thus inevitably ruined.

don’t want my thoughts and comments to be an income stream for a for-profit organization

(...)

The modern social media platform is not designed to foster positive interactions, but rather to maximize shareholder value.

This is so much more important than whatever elitism OOP implies.

I'm also not 40 btw.