> If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on

> If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service. You could say this current upset is about Reddit management being pressured into censoring more to appeal to advertisers. What you call "controllability" is a double-edged sword. > When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it [...] or you don't promote it's use [...] - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people. The same argument can be made for the Web as a whole, which despite appearances is still decentralised. When was the last time you heard a lay person say that they weren't interested in a website for their business because only unsavoury types use those? This is an implementation problem; people will self-host (or rent from Linode or w/e) if that's simple and not too expensive, and they'll take the centralised, ad-funded option if self-hosting is too hard and/or the loss of privacy is deemed the lesser cost. While concern for privacy seems to be on the rise, ideology has never been the deciding factor for the plurality of users.