It still requires a phone number to sign up, but you don’t need to share it to chat with someone

if you need a consent-or-pay example, just open La Repubblica’s homepage. You will be prompted with the “accept all cookies or pay” prompt as soon as you open the site. Pretty standard practice for most Italian online newspapers, sadly

I’m still trying to figure it out, but I guess not. The only thing I’m sure about is that you will know whether the OTP code has been sent by Telegram or a P2PL relay

You can decide to send sms codes only within your country. You decide whether the tradeoff between costs, privacy and features is worth it. Sending 150 sms a month (or a magnitude more) would cost me 0 €. I find some of the premium features worth paying for. But I would never relay OTP codes for telegram

Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram

It’s mainly to offload the cost of sending verification codes via sms to users, which is one of the costs that Telegram wants to cut. As far as I remember, it amounts to, like, 7% of all their annual expenses (I will source this later). A couple of years ago they decided not to send sms verification codes when you sign in from a third-party app, and just send the code to active session. This sounds like recipe for moderation headaches and privacy disasters, but also good way to boost their premium metrics :)

It’s opt-in, of course

I’ve just tried to sign up from Firefox 122 and it worked. No captcha or other kinds of anti-bot puzzle to solve

So it begins

Tried to open that webpage but godaddy asks me if I want to buy the domain. Typo?

Secret Hitler?? I think I’ve never been able to finish a game in less than an hour :D

From the article:

$100,000 per day for a country with ~5.4 million people is a lot. If even 20 percent used Facebook regularly, then that would still be 10 cents per user per day. It’s unlikely that Meta is generating so much profit per user - every day.

This is a reasonable observation and I wonder what Meta would do once one of their services becomes unprofitable in a specific country. Anyway if you add Instagram and WhatsApp to the math, maybe they would still generate profits from the Norwegian userbase

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The “extend” part is fundamental before they can actually get to the “extinguish” stage: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Once Meta joins in, a new set of dynamics are going to develop between old fediverse uses and new meta/fediverse users. If Meta adopts an “EEE” approach such as the ones described in the article, there’s going to be disruption in the user experience from which the fediverse might never fully recover

Edit: clarification on the last sentence, my main concern is that a growing niche protocol such as ActivityPub might be destined to irrelevancy after Meta is done with the Extend & Extinguish, similarly to what happened to XMPP