Automating jobs away is a good thing, many others here have explained why. When I read your title, I actually expected you would be writing about how AI is “detrimental to society” because it makes mistakes that humans don’t make and is therefore useless for anything serious; this, I would have had a harder time arguing against.

but it was trash at loading html websites

as opposed to websites written in excel 2003 format or what

what kinds of people are these who are signing a petition in favor of censorship?

I follow several news organizations, bloggers, activists there. For example you can get Linux news from https://techhub.social/@LinuxToday or posts from Richard Stallman’s blog at https://mastodon.xyz/@rms or the EFF is https://mastodon.social/@eff – of course those aren’t the only accounts I follow, just a sample of ones you might be interested in that have recently posted things.

You can also follow hashtags on Mastodon, that sometimes helps me find accounts to follow. Recently I have however been unfollowing more accounts than I’ve been newly following because my feed was getting spammed with too many things that I didn’t find very relevant.

ETA: you can also follow https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows if you are very desperate for random suggestions for things you could follow

I found that on old forums I did get to know the people regularly posting on them quite well over time (and they got to know me). On reddit and lemmy not so much, or do you have any idea about anything I’ve posted before (because I don’t know anything about you).

The main thing I would like to know is why so many people nowadays want a microblog platform, whether it is X or Bluesky or Mastodon, and why community-based platforms like Lemmy are getting relatively little attention in comparison.

Is it just that these people weren’t seriously online before the rise of microblogs? They didn’t start out with phpBB-style forums, so don’t miss their existence and think that individuals having followers is the normal state of the Internet? I’m genuinely not super sure what’s going on.