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

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

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

On a serious note, entactogens such as mdma (but also psychedelics such as shrooms or lsd) has been shown to strengthen pre-existing beliefs or in-group bounds with people subscribing to the same ideology or way of thinking. If you are, eg, a noenazi and take mdma while surrounded by other neonazis, chances are that you will strengthen your beliefs because you’re empathizing with the people surrounding you, and that enhanced empathy might strengthen what already links you to these people (hate, believing in conspiracy theories about jews, feeling to belong to a superior race, etc), especially if you believe you belong to a niche group that is being excluded by society or that is heroically fighting the power that be.

These kind of flips in a person’s way of thinking are possible when they are facing something that contradicts their existing beliefs or that might suggest that maybe they are hurting individuals that do not deserve to be hurt - but the drugs alone might have the opposite effect

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