I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.

That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.

Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.

I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs's, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it's fun.

We're going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We'll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You'll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we'll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.

Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won't be needed anymore.

That's when you'll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.

All in all, I'm not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don't want to be.

Using socialism as a boogeyman by definition, is a poor argument. There are merits to many different economic systems, many of which have pros and cons, capitalism and socialism included.

The laugh, and "listen" while providing absolutely no reasoning demonstrates a certain level of arrogance, while at the same time demonstrating a lack of knowledge on the subject

The real test of win/lose is if they are able to turn a profit

I don't think they care about their image. How many people decided to not see Avengers: End Game because the studios are greedy

It's not really about doing anything. It's about playing to the base. It's more politically advantageous to tell you string Christian base that you're banning porn, instead of educating them in why bans don't work, or could be harmful

I've been saved a couple of times from scam sites. Couldn't figure out why bitwarden didn't find a password for a site I use regularly, only to discover, I wasn't on the site I thought I was on

I think it's fair to say most people don't know what they're doing when they start. Just know that it's as easy to switch instances as it is to switch emails. You're not married to feddit.

Neat, but it still means nothing. You're still posting in a public forum. You can copyright or watermark your work, but fair use is a two way street.

But it's ok to dehumanize someone who I disagree with. /s.

As an agnostic, I have two answers. On the spiritual side, maybe...? I mean I don't know if God stuff is real, so how could I know if a soul is real?

On the other side, I wonder if as we delve deeper into quantum mechanics, were going to discover things about the human body, and the nature of life, that could conceivably be called a soul

I just think of the Watergate tapes. Is so easy now to take a minute of audio to mimic someone's voice, then make them say what ever you want. If Watergate happened today, it would be easy to deflect saying it was AI. Similarly, in less than an hour I could create a realistic conversation between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on a phone call admitting to rigging the system

Care to expound on why? I haven't seen anything too bad, nor extreme. Just opinions that dinner might agree with, others might disagree with

/r/places is a thing on Reddit where people cooperate to make art. People are using that opportunity to lambast Reddit at Reddit's expense

Plot twist: they deepfake the remakes to make them look more like the originals!

Being lazy and not going to look it up. I can't help it to wonder if it's also based in Sumerian's base 60

I'm using Liftoff, and it's pretty good

Use a VPN, and pipe the text-only output to your printer

So, a representative democracy, like we have in the US. But hasn't it been shown that elected leaders do not actually represent the people, just their own interests?

As an example, the mayor of my town has approved the funding for thousands of new homes, destroying the natural surroundings in the process. No one likes it except the builders. She'll be mayor next reelection. She'll continue to enjoy lavish dinners and vacations paid for by the construction companies.

OP is from feddit.nl

Honest question. How do we trust the state? For example: the state determines we need more coal/oil power plants and no solar energy.