oopsman88

Also, not everybody you disagree with acts in bad faith. Nazis, communists, anarchists, you name it: most of them believe their views of society will lead to a betterment of it. They don't adhere to their principles just because they want to fuck with others.

Moderators of highly restrictive instances (the most populous ones) blacklist all the instances they don't like. In fact most of those instances use a shared blacklist. So you have to make a choice: either you choose a restrictive instance and you can't talk about whatever you want (because with so many rules, where are they even drawing the line), or you go to a free instance and can't talk to anybody in the most populous instances (most of the network).

Or you simply get the best of both worlds and stay on Twitter.

Exactly. I get your point. But mine is: Mastodon shouldn't be publicised as an alternative to Twitter because it's not. It would be like publicising HN as an alternative to Reddit. HN only works as an alternative to Reddit for a very, very reduced group of people. People who share the same interests more or less, and with similar ideas about what flies in tech, politics, social movements, etc.

Because most of the bigger instances have shared blocklists. I am not interested in Mastodon as a tech stack, I am interested in joining a social network. But the truth is that it's all aligned to the political left. And I'm sad because I think Twitter is very politically charged and its alternative should be neutral. You can create your own instance or join a small instance you like, but that would be like IRC. I already use IRC every day, I don't need another IRC.

With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.

The point is that credit cards offer very valuable services in exchange for fees. Bitcoin offers nothing for a higher fee.

The problem is not having one single ID linked to everything, which most countries do. The problem is pretending that ID is a secret, which it is not. It's stupid to treat SSNs as passwords.

Just because India (India, of all places) can't do things right doesn't mean that a universal ID is a bad idea. Most countries in the world have a universal ID that hasn't been hacked to oblivion.

Court-ordered things are legal.

I speak Spanish and it all sounded very natural to me... :-)

He raises a good point. I've read some of this guy's stuff on Twitter, it's really pathetic. No wonder he's depressed if he lets himself be treated like this.