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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you but when they start fighting you, you know you've won.

It has to first get a little more extreem. They have to not just fight but start killing. Look at Napster. Napster was attacked and eventually died. But napster also won. CD sales are dead and we all download/stream music online. Mastadon will soon be attacked directly. It will also probably die as napster: a first cassualty of a revolution. What matters are the long-term changes that survive.

Mastodon will not die in the same way Napster did; it’s decentralized and there’s no way it can be completely shut down since anyone can run an instance.

There are ways. Placing regulatory burdens or legal liabilities on anyone running a social media instance would quickly make Mastadon untenable. Something as simple as manditory age verification might be enough.

GDPR exists right now, actually, and most instances are far from in compliance.

How are they not in compliance?

For example by not providing a privacy policy that contains all the information required by GDPR article 14.

Wouldn't that be only applicable if they were harvesting people's information submitted by other people?

My first thought is that people running Mastodon wouldn't qualify as data controllers, but I am no expert in GDPR laws.

Legal strategies won’t work effectively, just as they haven’t against BitTorrent pirating and sites like the pirate bay. Likely there will always be a jurisdiction where those restrictions don’t apply.

The instances can move to jurisdictions where the regulatory burdens and legal liabilities are slightly different.

It’s also not massively violating copyright. Napster was shut down through legal action.

Napster didn’t kill CD sales. iTunes/iPods did

Arguably, it was streaming that really killed CD sales.

iTunes was the number one music seller between 2003-2008. Way before streaming became a thing.

That doesn't go against what I said, though, that it was streaming that really killed CD sales.

Delivery of music over the internet killed cd sales. Napster proved that people wanted online music. That enabled everything else. It forced the industry to adapt or die.

Napster peaked in 2000.

Here is a chart of CD sales

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/

You do not see any sharp drop off because of Napster.

No, but you do see the rise of online distribution, which killed cd sales.

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