To be fair, from 2022. I would argue that moderation in Fedi is holding together reasonably well. There are a few popular instances that lots of people think are overly aggressive/purist in their moderation policies, but the people using them seem to like what they're getting.
ATProto is an interesting protocol and there is lots of room to argue about its plus and minuses (and about Fedi/Masto's), but lots of people are already doing that so I won't.
My concern isn't technology or culture, it's money. At the moment, ATProto is existentially dependent on Bluesky PBC, a venture-funded startup ($100M from Bain Capital). There are people doing good work to make it more decentralized, more power to them, but at the moment it's still deeply centralized. And it's hard to see what the business model is that will support what Bsky PBC does at a global scale. Eventually Bain will want to see a revenue stream that justifies their investment; maybe there's a way to do that that doesn't involve enshittification but it's certainly not obvious.
You can dislike the instance-centeredness of Fedi/Masto (seems to have worked OK for email over the decades) but it's an actual thing that's actually working. And offers account migration without losing followers if you don't like the instance you're on. And has multiple really excellent client software packages. And seems to be covering its costs through a mixture of Patreon, co-operative & nonprofits, some Euro-gov help, all without any VC input. It can't be bought or owned by anybody.
Put another way, this is a really interesting space. But the technology is less interesting than the culture, and the culture is less interesting than the m money.
I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent.
I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them.
On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.
Well, healthcare is an increasing piece of government spending all over the world, and the population is aging, so politics and policy aside, that number is going to go up.
You're right, but I didn't realize that till later. Except for the original "Parable of the Sower" was from Jesus not Olivia. But I also thought of Olivia's first.
Got me jobs, helped me hire other people, got me a ticket to some of the big technology debates and then helped me win one or two. Gave me a place to write cat obituaries and heavy-metal reviews. Launched Feb 27, 2003 (20 years last month) and I haven't regretted it for a microsecond.
We agree, AWS is a clean break, ads is way more messy.
But ads only works because of Amazon retail's sorta-kinda-monopoly position. It's still a big distortion of the market. But I don't have a bright idea what to do about it.
Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation.
If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics.
Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price.
There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.