Comment by dspillett

4 days ago

It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).

Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).

> It is amusing

Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...

It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.

At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.

> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information

my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.