I don’t think my adblocker cares what kind of ads they’re trying to show me. If anything their algorithms will just get confused for why this guy who used to be here hours every day now only comes to watch war videos once a day but no longer comments or upvotes anything.

While I basically agree with what you’re saying, I’d also like to point out that the money they get from you watching ads is miniscule. I don’t remember which YouTuber it was, maybe Matthias Wandell, who said that if you donate just one dollar, that’s more than they’re ever going to profit from you watching ads.

‘Look for what’s looking’ is something he often says in his daily meditation sessions on the Waking Up app, which famously frustrates people. ‘There’s just consciousness and its content’ is also a direct quote from him.

Neither of these he probably came up with by himself, but that’s his way (and in my view, the best way) of saying it.

You’re not piloting a bone mech, you are it.

It feels like you’re behind your face looking out into the world but once you pay close attention and look for what’s looking you’ll discover there’s nothing there. There’s no “you” in a sense that there’s someone behind the wheel. There’s just consciousness. It feels like something to be. A subjective experience.

Defederating doesn’t prevent them from seeing what you post. It only prevents you from seeing them

These are all porn*

Taxes pays my education and healthcare, it funds the military that makes russia think twice before invading my country, it builds and maintains all the roads and bridges I use every day to move around, it pays food and housing for the people that can’t afford that themselves.

I’m gladly paying taxes as long as it’s not all going to the pockets of corrupt politicans.

They can do that on Facebook because it’s their code and their platform. They can probably do that on their app and and instance too to some extent but I don’t think they can grab much more than the content of your messages and your likes if you’re on a different instance. Lemmy is open source; if there was a way to get that data we’d know about it.

Even if we defederate with them they can still grab all the content here. Defederation just stops the flow of content from their instance to ours. Defederation just hides the comments from Threads’ users on our discussions.

I think the real test is when they start demanding that other instances start moderating their content to comply with Facebook’s terms of service and if not then defederate and make them unable to communicate with the by-far biggest instance on the fediverse with almost all the users.