There is a MAS solution for windows that activates it on GitHub. I had to use it when the key I purchased a decade ago didn’t work when I upgraded my hardware. I didn’t want to pay a second time for an OS that was going to push Cortana, OneDrive, and ads at me.

I used to greatly prefer MacOS until I switched my desktop from Windows to Linux and got comfortable there troubleshooting and installing things. Now I feel exactly the same as you with MacOS. Trapped.

I regularly have YouTube channels on in the background as I work. After a few auto play recommendations that I wasn’t paying attention to, I ran into a couple about astronomy and I got excited for a second, because it was talking about the discovery of Planet X and other stuff… But as I paid attention to it, I recognised some blatant falsehoods, and it began to repeat itself with different verbage. It was really weird stuff too because I enjoy watching/listening to conspiracy and paranormal stuff.

I looked at the channel description and found out it was an entirely AI content generated account/channel. I was flabbergasted.

Same. I got brigaded in my first 24 hours because I corrected someone on a RUS/UKR disinfo comment they made. Nearly made me leave. I’ve blocked both instances in my client but I still occasionally see them pop up for some reason regardless of the alt account I’m on.

That was my assumption too. My main account was on lemmy.ml and it was almost three months before I found out the “.ml” part apparently stood for “Marxist-Leninist”. This came as a surprise, as I hadn’t seen anything in the server espousing that, and Lemmygrad and Hexbear were seemed to attract the lion’s share of Leftists.