The biggest issue involves the logistics on the ground, and in places with extremely high food insecurity, there tends to be little to no legitimate government, and so getting anything done involves dealing with local gangs and warlords. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if every shipment you send will just be stolen at gunpoint and sold to fund the local thug’s next golden toilet. This is not a problem that can really be solved by throwing money at it.
Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.
The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.
The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.
So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.
I’m not saying that the terms can’t be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.
But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don’t get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don’t actually apply to you. If you don’t want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don’t use them.
I mean, yes?
If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.
This may be a cynical view, but even if that does happen, the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact and at worst be relegated to a small community of tech nerds, which is to say, basically the status quo.
Facebook, and literally anyone else, can already get all your content.
It would take all of a second to scrape your user page. Obviously that wouldn’t grant your IP address or anything, but neither would federation.
It’s publicly sitting on the internet.
Meta also doesn’t need to federate in order to do that, since federation just accesses public data.
Take the old adage “treat others how you would want to be treated” - is that something you believe because you’ve just been told that for so long? Or is that something you intrinsically believe in regardless of what others have said?
For what it’s worth, this is essentially the “tit-for-tat” strategy from game theory, and you can rigorously prove it to be a superior cooperative strategy in many situations. Essentially, cooperation with others enables greater community success than everyone going alone, but trusting others always exposes you to selfish people that will take advantage of you. The optimal strategy is to cooperate by default, but if someone reveals themselves to be untrustworthy, stop cooperating and ideally work with others to punish them.
You actually see this bear out in nature in other animals as well. Vampire bats will share blood with other vampire bats that didn’t successfully feed, but they also keep track of individual contributions, and if they identify that a bat is freeloading, they’ll stop feeding it. By default, they cooperate to help each other, but if a selfish actor is identified, they stop helping it.
In the abstract, so long as most actors aren’t selfish and the cost of being betrayed isn’t too high, tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy.
That’s completely normal for literally any new platform. You saw the same thing with Threads, down to the hordes of people proclaiming it dead after the initial wave of interest calmed down.
The consequence is that, for many niche interests, there simply aren’t enough people in the Fediverse to form a viable community about it.
Just to throw a random example that crossed my mind, /r/glassblowing has 32,000 members. There is no Lemmy community as far as I can find. I actually got some useful advice from /r/terrariums, with 180,000 members, when I made a terrarium a month ago. I don’t believe there’s an equivalent Lemmy community.
Reddit’s massive strength is that it’s big enough that essentially any interest or topic, no matter how small, has enough people into it that they can form a productive community. That size also means that the default communities become absolute dogshit, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.
Kbin is a bit saner on average, in my experience.
That’s proven to be both unpopular and often having unintended side effects.