I am quite conflicted. On the one hand this is extraordinarily bad for American democracy, but there is a feeling in me that said democracy farce at this point.

I also believe that this will justify further violence from the right towards lgbt/left/immigrants etc. But would that happen anyway?

I think for my friends it’s just what we have been using for literally a decade since we were kids, combined with apathy towards privacy - although of my friends does use duckduckgo. I don’t judge them for that since I’ve been pretty bad with privacy. I do worry if we get into more activism that we will need to secure our privacy

That’s great to hear. In my experience every second paper I ran into needed a subscription, although I am guessing they weren’t federally funded research or from a country where that isn’t required by law

We really need to push for fully open access research. I believe the ACM has announced a transition to open access, so there is that. However I think there needs to be legislated open access. Specifically, any federally funded research (or research from publicly funded universities) that is to be published should be forced to be open access. In America I don’t think that’s going to happen for a while lmao, but hopefully other countries can do this.

The Australian labor government didn’t have age verification as one of their core policies. Also the specifics in Australia is being done by the esafety commission rather than through parliament. This whole age verification stuff is very undemocratic in nature

lib is when anti genocidal dictator?

The problem here is the lack of a current alternative. As others here have mentioned, peertube might be a future alternative, but I can not help but feel that only fairly ideological people like myself would be interested (in the sense of dropping youtube on privacy grounds). I can’t see “normies” moving elsewhere. That said, maybe a good alternative doesn’t require mass uptake. I mean Lemmy seem pretty cool, albeit I haven’t been here very long at all (like a day lol, although I have lurked for sometime).