Public trading… it’s capitalism. By law you have to try and extort every penny.

Quite true… I suppose that’s also the problem of the networks that are focused at privacy/control nerds first, and trying to get more mainstream users second.

The suggested follow is the types of features we are afraid of… The developers came to these places because they don’t want to be told what to do… IE literally that’s the exact problem with twitter right now, is Musk is personally shoving his right wing crap in our faces whether we want to look at it or not. But what regular people want… is to have crap shoved in their faces that they like and agree with.

Which I suppose development of mastadon and the like just hadn’t reached the point, we go at minimum viable, and get what you specifically are looking for… with a lack of excitement for trying to use algorythms to tell people what they like.

Was going to say, why wouldn’t it be the USA.

Competition is… well about competitive. A unilateral Tariff hurts everyone equally.

So if China was selling batteries to the US at $4

Taiwan was selling them at $3.90

You slap a $2 tarrif on both countries.

China raises the price to $6 to compensate, Taiwan to $5.90, Both countries make the same profit per battery sold. Unless there happens to be a US company that can make the batteries at $5 (not likely as we don’t currently have the infrastructure, and a lot of products are dependent on natural resources that we just don’t have).

Tech so loves to repeat the same loops, and IMO I think it’s on us the fediverse for really failing to communicate the value of instances as well as making them easy.

(Number of people that have told me they think mastadon sounds like a good idea, but they don’t know how to pick the right instance). I try and smack them and say "it’s just like e-mail, you and your friends don’t have to choose gmail, your friend can be on yahoo, and you still talk to eachother. Whcih makes sense when explained, but it seems like few hear that kind of comparison.

So… we have a new platform, to replace twitter… yay!.. should we take counts on how long before either enshittification begins, flooding of ads or changes to be unusable), or it sells out to another already established billionare that abuses the power of media control etc…

My point is, they gave enough lip service, half gestures etc… to try and convince the “don’t murder everyone in Gaza” some hope that they could be worked with. IE, they delayed one shipment, Harris didn’t meet with Netanyahu that one time.

Again fully agreed they were ineffective half measures, but that was enough to let the Pro-Isreal lobby go in super deep “OH MY GOD LOOK HOW ANTI-SEMETIC THEY ARE!!! I NEVER”.

Take Rust in Linux, for example. Even with support from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds, Rust is moving into Linux at a snail’s pace.

Because Linux is the biggest software in the entire world and they do lot of stuff their own way. Rust is integrated slowly for future new projects. It makes sense to move in snail pace. The government doesn’t suggest the Linux project to stop using C entirely. The government “recommends” to start new projects in memory safe languages, if it is a critical software. That makes sense to me.

Doubly so… Don’t care what the language is, or what the advantages are… Even if there’s a considerable security advantage to a new language… There’s no such thing as a language that’s advantages outweigh the security risks of rushed development to convert decades of tested code.

IMO I think the common thread of democrats policies… is they keep thinking if they put one foot in both camps, that they will get both camps.

So, on Gaza… they took the stance of. “let the genocide continue, send the weapons, but also send sternly worded letters”.

Result: The stand with isreal crowd hears “The democrats don’t support isreal”. The stop the genocide people, hear they are still supporting the genocide. Result, everyone hates their stance.

Hence why musks superpac sent 2 ads, one to jewish areas pretending to be the harris campaign saying “I stand with palestine”, and an ad to the muslim populated areas saying “I stand with isreal”.

Same on the border, instead of announcing how BS the “Migrant crime” claims are, or how bad for everyone mass deportation is, she just said “I tried to give you everything on the border, you stopped me”.

Phones is absolutely a valid point these days, IMO OS > web + web browser in terms of what you can get.

MS and google both know what porn you are looking at. What you buy from your PC etc… MS knows how much time you are spending playing games + has screenshots of all your encrypted conversations etc…

Honestly I disagree… From what I’ve heard from app developers etc… ads generate far less money than even $1 app sales. Now maybe that’s the brokers etc… But there’s also a reason why Hulu shut down their purely ad supported tier, and none of the big companies are leaning into that. Only “subscribe and get ads” lower dollar tiers.

I’m no super expert, but I think ads are still very inefficiant ways to make money… the profit per customer is very small even with the most privacy invasive blast you away with everything aspect. I don’t claim to be an expert, but it appears to me an ad supported service needs around 100x more users to make the same money as a low cost service. However, in actual userbases it goes closer to 1000x when that offer is on the table.

because then things would just shut down… The poor suckers that don’t use adblockers are what pay the bandwidth and hosting costs for those of us that do. If it becomes the default, things would either shutdown or go paywall.

I mean the concept is pretty simple, all they have to do is make whatever the content it is not play without the verification.

Now I do have to say, it does come down to what is the system we do want? We can agree we don’t want intrusive ads. We can say that the paid for services are too expensive. But at the end of the day when we refuse to pay for the content, and then bypass the ads, we do leave content creation in a rough spot. We’ve kind of reached a point where we need a new system. Yet all we seem to do is try and find ways to break the existing one.

Is there an actual group pushing for that? (I’m pretty sure I remember a decade or so back there being an arm the homeless group, that put out santa’s etc… though didn’t actually accept donations. (Their actual goal was common sense gun laws, and they knew the people who are pro-gun would argue strongly against it shooting their own pro-gun arguements in the foot).