This is still validating the profit incentive of private health insurance.

If the doctor prescribes unnecessary care, it should be none of these peoples’ business, because they shouldn’t be allowed any stake in the decision whatsoever.

No. Everybody knows that some people stand up for mass murderers, so long as they do it by enough proxy layers.

Plenty of people betray society for want of looking down on others

The principle should be “harm society at large, abandon the protections of society”.

Something… something… Do do do do doooo!

I do know. I just don’t care. I believe in an open internet, not a place set aside for people to live out their Revenge of the Nerds fantasies. ActivityPub allows people to have their sheltered spaces, and also not attack the public square.

They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.

We’ll never stop the Simpsons :(

It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.

The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that’s… just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.

Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don’t want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.

If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.

Profit is what’s left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It’s either what you’ve over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.

And that’s wrong.

It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.

There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.

Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.

But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.

Removed by mod

Couldn’t disagree more.

The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.

And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.

Blueberry, and it’s not even close

Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse.

The vast majority of people landed on the largest severs, where there was a ton of chatter in both the Local and Global feeds. They couldn’t find anyone because they were accustomed to using search to find connections, and Mastodon’s search is so tightly locked down that it’s borderline impossible to find who or what you’re looking for. The idea of checking other feeds didn’t even seem to occur to many people – something that I, as an avid “what’s that button do?” user, find totally bizarre, but seems to be rather standard for most people interacting with new things.

If the default view had been Local or something, the story could have been very different.

many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway

This really shouldn’t be a consideration. ActivityPub is a public standard for this kind of communication between websites, and the protocol really needs to be agnostic about which websites one is interested in using it to connect with. “I don’t want Amazon using HTTP along side my indie blog” is a nonsensical statement, and so it “I don’t want Facebook using ActivityPub”.

Oh, he’s not complaining anymore.

There are several reasons why Mastodon doesn’t work for normal people, but the biggest one is, honestly, Mastodon users. People have shown themselves to be rather inventive in the face of technical limitations, or they’re willing to put up with toxic people for the sake of a great user experience, but you need the people who show up in the space to not experience both negatives.

A lot of Mastodon’s UX is really frustrating, in large part because Mastodon tries to disguise the fact that everyone’s using different websites. People would be a lot more forgiving of the jankiness of federation if they truly understood that what they’re doing is the equivalent of talking to Facebook users from Twitter. But the UI of Mastodon, the language of Mastodon, the layout of Mastodon, the features of Mastodon, and even the ‘marketing’ of Mastodon all try to make it look like the @website.com at the end of everyone’s name is just some frilly flair.

Lemmy has some similar issues, frankly, though not nearly as bad. And Lemmy is a space where I think we will see the idea of talking to people across different websites will really be treated as more core to the culture of the space, because Lemmy isn’t really going out of its way to hide the nature of the space as much as Mastodon is.

Still, I wish the hosting websites were treated as first-class citizens by Lemmy itself, rather than as just the url the ‘communities’ are taking up space on.

Worth noting that, at least as of the last time I checked, this wasn’t necessarily true of other fesiverse microblogs with list features. Like, I think you can add someone to a list or an antenna or something in Misskey without having to follow them first, so there’s no notification

Imagine your essential services are all run for profit, by entities with the goal of maximizing profits and minimizing service.

I can’t wait for the future where we’re paying subscription fees for a thousand separate essential services and the libertarians start suggestinf thet there should just be a service that provides a single source for paying and managing all of tjose subscriptions.

This is how you get people whining about there being 8 different “Politics” groups, and insisting they should be allowed to erase the identity of the hosting website.

The patchwork nature of the fediverse is baked into the technology. If people don’t at least have a basic model for how it behaves, then they’re just going to get pissed off at it and leave.

Ypu don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive, but you have to understand how driving works, both from the perspective of operating a car, and from that of the conventions of the road.

“Just find a pretty car and hop behind the wheel” is bad advice for everyone.