Considering you seem to dislike the whole concept of Bots, isn’t the Bot toggle in the Lemmy profile exactly what you want?

It auto ignores all posts and comments made by accounts marked as Bots. Sure, the owner of the account has to correctly mark it, but I feel that can easily be solved by reporting unmarked bots.

But I’m interested, if you would like to expand on it, how would you make a bot opt-in?
The only way I could think of is through PMs, but that would be cumbersome, and generally unfit for purpose, for all the involved parties.

The (IMHO) important bits:

TLDR:

Our continuous internal reviews and beta test groups have highlighted areas that we need to focus on more, mainly performance and content

From the FAQ:

Is the game canceled?
No, the game is not canceled.

What happens to pre-orders?
All pre-orders will be refunded in the upcoming weeks. The option to pre-order the game will be removed and the bonus will instead be added to the base game for all

Is there going to be Early Access or Beta Access to the game?
There will not be an early access or extra beta access right now

In the blog there are the steps to how to get the refunds, I’m not copying them in case they change.

As they say, A Delayed Game Is Eventually Good, But a Bad Game Is Bad Forever ^/s?

No way. That’s illegal!

It says it can lead to health issues… Not that it will… soooo…

On the contrary, in my opinion if they are clearly labelled as a joke, they are a great way for people who don’t understand them to ask why and, in the process, being a little more informed on what not to do and what it’s dangerous.

Especially because there’s really no risk of emulation in this case.

I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.

Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.

Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.

as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward.

That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.

Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.

So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.

Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.

Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.

“One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”

Let me translate this for you: "We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.

And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!"

Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.

“We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.

Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.

I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.