… Which means that businesses are making ‘too much’ money on top to sink into such endeavors, no?

For the vendor (non-)consent thing - Consent-O-Matic provides an appropriate framework.

(Whether such a side would even care about the preference/consent is another matter entirely - I’d suggest a throwaway browser identity and cookie auto delete for a start, anyway.)

Creating rules has a bit of a learning curve the first three or seven times, but I find that more interesting to do than go through a hostile/dark pattern cookie dialog or such the third time.

Hm, maybe the appropriate functionality from CoM could be re-wrapped as a TamperMonkey module…

Web automation for the masses 😱

12ft.io and/or archive.is/archive.today/… are worth trying in such cases (assuming you already have the latest version of the current ByPass addon, see the other comment).

Regarding cookie pop-ups, there’s a little known gem: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

Could also be the exact opposite (experienced this with consumer grade electronics based on microcontrollers often enough):

Because of the large capacitors, voltage from the power brick kinda “ramps up” when it is plugged into the wall. The device/its MCU/most specifically its clock circuit however prefers a hard edge of power being turned on, to reliably trigger its power on reset circuit/oscillator.

You can think of it similar to a pendulum/newton’s cradle/metronome - they also prefer one decisive push to get going reliably.

Unplugging the brick for a longer time is still worth a try, but it could also be this.

The ruling has been updated to say that accepting cannot be more convenient/streamlined/less clicks than rejecting, though.

Getting that enforced is another matter altogether, however.

There’s CookieAutoDelete (or anonymous tabs, containers, …) for the other side of this issue.

But they happily give it to Threads, no…?

Yes, I know, I’m being somewhat more provocative here than necessary.

More down to reality, thousands of accounts being registered within seconds, possibly all from the same IP, aren’t ordinary user activity. And quite feasible to filter for.

Heck, you could even ask for the eMail and offer some “or, if you rather wouldn’t, you could…” thing that basically serves as a CAPTCHA.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t read into that referenced article by ninja at all, maybe it already says something related)

For one, it may be possible to filter accounts that were created but actually never used to log on, within a week or two of creation - those could go without much harm done IMO.

And/or, you could message such accounts and ask them for email verification, which would need to be completed before they can interact in any way (posting, commenting, voting). That latter one is quite probably currently not directly supported by the Lemmy software, but could be patched in when the need arises.

How would they ensure this latter thing?

In my current understanding, it’s readily possible today (on Lemmy and related software), what could Meta do to keep this from continuing to work?

I “tried” to use XMPP/Jabber in its heyday, but in my experience (& memory) it never got to the point to have a “critical mass” of community (I felt to be part of / want to be part of).

Fediverse/Lemmy has this critical mass at least since some weeks now - unless too many of those users decide to leave for another place, I’m happy here no matter what other things get hyped in a given week.

Back in Jabber’s day, I would have liked to see it develop some communities as they did - and still do! - exist on IRC, but that simply never happened (with one I would both be interested in and could find).

I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:

I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.

Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it “must”, in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn’t subscribe to in the first place, anyway).

I don’t see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse “centered” communities?

I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I’ve seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, …) in the last decade or so.