gcthomas

It's more centralised now after several decades because monopolistic companies saw commercial value in squeezing out the competition. Plenty of technical folk have given up their own servers because the dominant providers ruined the system by blocking their emails.

Fediverse isn't VC funded and isn't a 'product' in the sense that Twitter is. Obsession with eternal growth is a function of the funding model. Those putting money or time into this are not looking for a financial return - they are trying to sustain a public service.

If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.

If that's their take, needing a news feed, then they wouldn't benefit from a social media service. One way comms isn't very social.

It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.

Want to join Email? First you have to choose a server ...

No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.

You can put images links in fine, between lines. Stick your svgs in and publish.

O365 works cross platform in the browser well enough for most windows-centric corps. I've got by happily for years with Vivaldi and Libreoffice, without Windows installed.

Thanks, it seems that I have been interpreting the term pro-choice incorrectly.

Your link shows 81% in favour of abortion, with or without some restrictions, with 19% against abortion. Wanting abortion rights is not synonymous with being pro-choice, which carries implications of no restrictions at all.

> If you go to your uBlock origin plugin settings > filter lists > annoyances > checkmark "fanboy's annoyances", "adguard annoyances", and "uBlock annoyances"

This ^^ hits the spot. No need to accept the dark UI patterns (illegal but everywhere) without the pain of going through the options. Works brilliantly.

Google has grown by using ad revenue to buy comoetitors or companies that do something interesting, then squeeze them for every penny of profit or dump them.

Google has a dominant search engine, a browser and massively intrusive ad placement system threaded through everything they offer. Gmail was a Hotmail clone. Android, Fitbit, Maps, Nest, and Google Earth were acquired. YouTube was bought after it out competed Google's offering. Even the advertising tech was acquired, with AdMob, DoubleClick invented outside Google.

They are dominant mostly because they have not been bothered by antitrust actions. That, at least, looks like it might happen sometime relatively soon.

Austria is a simple train-ride away for the Dutch - it doesn't cost a long haul flight's worth of CO₂ to go skiing.

It seems that I get hit with the negative first order effects, and VCs benefit from the putative positive second order ones. No, I'm happy to have the legal eagles stop this without-consent data sharing, and if the corporations lose a bit of money, then that's fine by me.

It is the most powerful tools that I want restricted. the milli-second bidding auctions for ad placements and the tracking that goes on to enable that is unethical and illegal. There are perfectly good alternatives that don't abuse my personal data — companies should use those.