The original article is from Axios. They do point out that there’s organic opposition, but the title is definitely sensational and arguably disinformation.

Now, even if they actually are adding extra to the conversation, there’s still plenty of people unhappy about data centers. If foreign bots were adding noise to the Cornell case, does that invalidate what happened to Jane Doe?

We see the videos from town halls, we see the pictures of the water, we hear the recordings of the noise pollution. We see all the extra infrastructure that sometimes cuts through people’s property.

There are legitimate concerns that people want to be addressed.

People who study how to convince people are more trusted than people trained to talk in technical jargon about specific fields. Shocker there.

On the flip side: Flock is giving people awareness of other surveillance creepware.

YOU HAVE MADE A BLOOD PACT WITH WORLD.

ML HATES YOU NOW

This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

That’s so much extra work

Big same lol

Boiling it down to 3 things:

1. Content Scale & Variety - Lemmy has a lot of content but it’s very tech/political heavy. It doesn’t have much to offer outside of that domain. Meanwhile, there’s a whole shitposting subreddit dedicated to an NFL conference – I don’t even closely follow professional American football, but it’s glorious.
2. User Experience Friction - You can’t just sign up, you need to pick a server. You’ve already lost a significant amount of people in that step.
3. User Base - There’s nice folks on here, but some really sour the experience for the rest of us by being straight up hostile if we don’t agree on every little detail.