Currently, Meta is testing their systems on 5% of Canadian users to block news links. Their press release said that they will activate full blocking 100% before the bill takes effect. While the bill has received royal assent and is now law, there is the process with the Governor in Council where they figure out when provisions take effect. I've read through the text of the bill and re-read the Coming into Force provisions (at the end of the bill), but there doesn't appear to be any hint as to when this takes effect beyond another government body figuring this all out.

So, for now, Meta is only continuing their tests and Google is rumoured to be speaking with the government on how all of this is even going to work. The government has had a long history of refusing to listen to anyone daring to criticize the bill, let alone anyone related to the platforms, so I'm not exactly holding my breath over the Google talks.

We're kind of in a weird calm before the storm moment with all of this. I don't know what the link blocks will look like or how severe everything will be, but barring some sort of miracle at the 11th hour, it's only a matter of time before things get ugly.

It looks like the old game with a new paint job. Honestly, that's probably all it really needs because there was almost nothing to complain about with the original. If Nintendo managed to get the greenlight from Square to repurpose Geno, I would almost wonder if Nintendo might be interested in taking a crack at what might have been before licensing issues with that character caused Nintendo to switch to the Paper Mario series.

The legal liability of Twitter continues to build up. It may take a long time to chip away at a $44bn investment, but that time is by no means infinite.

I know the feeling. When I jumped ship from Twitter to Mastodon, every time I visited Twitter, I felt dirty just opening my own profile. This mixed in with the feeling of "why am I even here?"

I just wanted to say thank you SO much for all this attention!

As for questions of the use of the phrase ActivityPub, I used that because Mastodon is also seeing the huge growth that is happening on here and Lemmy. So, the question then became whether to say it is growth in Mastodon or growth in KBin/Lemmy, but none of those made any sense. I could've went with the growth on the fediverse, but the fediverse is more of the word used to describe the type of protocol. It kind of made sense, but it made more sense in my head to refer to the protocol, ActivityPub. When users sign up to KBin, Lemmy, Beehaw, or Mastodon, the protocol as a whole benefits. A user signs up to Mastodon, then KBin also sees an increase by one user. Same thing for the other way around. So, that's how I settled on that headline in the end.

Anyway, it is SUPER exciting to see the growth of KBin, Lemmy, and Beehaw. I really like the idea of decentralized social media and the idea that it's ad and tracker free is a huge bonus. I really hope I am witnessing a huge long term success story in its early days.

Based on my experience when I was joining Mastodon in the initial wave that happened when Twitter began melting down, there's going to be some teething processes to go through. Servers will go down, doubters will jump on the slightest hint of things not going well, but I have a feeling that the growing pains will be less severe than when Twitter first got huge. Mastodon handled the initial waves of users way better than a lot of people thought possible, so if history repeats itself, people may be surprised with how well KBin, Lemmy, and Beehaw handle the unflux as well. The fun of decentralized servers!