There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
Things I’ve learnt:
the American continental army tried to take Quebec early in the war but were unsuccessful
inhabitants of British Canadian territory did not have the same sentiment towards Independence as in the 13 American colonies, it was far more sparsely populated, lived in closer association with indigenous people, and was not economically large enough to consider independence
after the war, many British loyalists left America and settled in Canada causing the cultures to diverge even more
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and other bits all used to be part of British Québec
America attempted to claim modern day Quebec in the Paris peace talks after the war
in the end the British surrendered only the above territories with the border becoming more or less the modern US-Canadian one