That's fair. You don't need to know any of those things to use the platforms in whatever ways best suit you.

That said:

Decentralized means no one entity "owns" Lemmy. Lemmy is free, libre, open-source software (FLOSS). This means the software (Lemmy itself) is free to use, with few restrictions (or none), and available to anyone for review and/or modification. It's also built by contributors and any member of the public can offer contributions. Most open-source projects are like this.

This is the opposite approach of the social media platforms like Facebook and such. They use proprietary software that they claim to write themselves and claim to exclusively own. Each of the big tech social media sites is owned and operated by a company. They are centralized platforms. They have a center of control and users of those platforms are bound to the whims of the owners (CEO, shareholders, etc).

Choosing to abandon those platforms and instead use social media built using FLOSS (which no one person or group owns) means no one can stop you from having and using that platform however you want. It puts the power of social media in everyone's hands instead of only the hands of the rich and exploitative.

If the Lemmy instance you use gets shut down for some reason you can just go to another instance and keep using Lemmy.

Decentralization doesn't solve every problem though. A decentralized service can still be used to create some kind of monolith. If you wanted to create your own Lemmy instance and share really important information there then you could do that. You could also try to gatekeep it in some ways. Force users to do something you want or give you something of value in order to get the important thing you have. It would be dumb to try but you could still do it.

Federation means everything gets shared by default. If I post on infosec.pub (my current home instance) that information does not stay on infosec.pub. It is automatically offered by default to every other Lemmy instance that wants it. Administrators are able to change the default settings and many do so to curate their instance in ways that are helpful.

Federation means unity that people choose. Examples would be The United Federation of Planet from Star Trek or the European Union (kind of). The "Fediverse" refers to all the different software platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol to Federate with each other. Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy, and a bunch of other software depend on ActivityPub to make sure the information users share is shared with everyone.

Decentralization makes it tough to gate-keep things (among other benefits). Federation makes it tough to manipulate or weaponize. Bad actors still try to do those things but using software like Lemmy or Mastodon for evil looks weird to everyone. Even for people who don't know what being decentralized and federated means.

I hope that info isn't you're looking for and that you find it helpful. If you've got other questions feel free to drop a reply. 🙂

The info above is an overview. There's nuance I'm ignoring on purpose that some might be nitpicky about. Those people are probably correct, are also likely abysmal educators, and certainly no fun at parties.

Replying solely as a show of solidarity.

I was raised in a Christian home, home-schooled (which my mom and dad were exceptional at, actually, religious brainwashing aside), then attended Christian college prep schools for my highschool diploma.

I deconverted in my twenties after watching a YouTube video which made avoiding the fact of evolution too unreasonable. The rest pretty quickly unraveled from there. I've spent many nights disassembling newly discovered pockets of disinformation in my brain. It's incredible how clever the little twists of half-truth are... How easily they're manipulated to a premise which seems plausible but is then used to support abject absurdity.

It's no wonder institutional religion and fascism are such good bedfellows.

I'll add that old expeditions can be played and the rewards earned. It takes a bit of wrangling but is not out of reach for the non-techical. You have to be offline during the play-through but can go online again afterward.

https://cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/ That repo has the tools and instructions to make it happen. It also has links to some other resources interested parties might find useful.

Dogs may be goobers but they aren't spuds and not acceptable foodstuffs either way. Regardless of breed. You monster.

tl;dr: you're paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I'd rather be paying directly than use a "free" service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.

No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.

In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn't scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.

Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.

Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that's a different conversation).

That's a gross and inaccurate accusation by way of assumption.

It reinforces the "reputation farming super user" trope.

The irony of a post with that specific brand of ragebait on x getting cross-posted to lemmy by yet another Miisha alt is so thick it borders on parody.

To throw a hat in the rhetorical ring:

All Men is to All Cops what All People is to All Rapists.

Men and People are inherited categories. They cannot be categories of choice. Cops and Rapists are, inescapably, categories of choice. The comparison of Men to Police seems apt at a glance but undermines itself by way of category error. Then it alienates via demonization the very demographic it is ostensibly meant to sway.

I doubt most good faith interpretation of the phrase anyway because it is so well crafted as a thought terminating cliche. Such rhetoric is rarely the product of dialogue or ideals focused on alliance, progress or solidarity.

A more useful rhetorical twist would be re-wording "If a Nazi is sitting at the table, and ten others are sitting there chatting with him, you have eleven Nazis at the table." into something like "Sexual abuse is common because we think of 'rapist' as an exclusive label. It isn't though. If one person abuses another at a party, and ten others notice or even suspect abuse but say nothing, then there were eleven rapists at the party". That's clunky but I'm not going to take the time to wordsmith it right now and I'm sure the point is clear enough.

There's also a 'w', 'wee', and 'weed' in there so: Wee! Recursive writes!

This but unironically. What was once a marvel is now mundane.

Modern skyscrapers are built with base isolation and mass dampening to make them resistant to earthquakes. Have you seen recent cargo ships? Warehouses? They are great and awful in every sense of both words.

That's excellent! I'm with you and agree that we're the minority.

The center point of dialogue on this topic isn't about Google specifically though. It's addressing the rug pull of the internet we were sold on while it was being built, and enshittification more generally. Not merely its possibility or even inevitability within capitalism but that the enshittification of everything is being normalized while the internet the public built is being stripped for parts by robber-barons.

So much so that industries built around norms, and all of the labor and jobs within them, are being lost. Even setting ideals aside for a moment: the harm that brings to the lives of working class people is immense. A minor apocalypse with long-term consequences all for short-term gains for a scant few over a handful of financial quarters. The beast is eating itself in real-time.

Even for those who champion it the reality of the situation is sour at best.

Your guess is as good as mine. I can imagine low-effort workflows. They would still require set up / config. The functional return, as I understand it, is nil.