Nothing but end-times news these past couple of weeks.

Lovely bokeh!

I will give this a shot!

SO many corporate/govt websites do this. My health insurance and credit card company do it. It’s mind boggling. I always keep some variation of Chromium installed to deal with it and then go back to LibreWolf.

I really don’t know if you could.

Having seen OpenAI’s trajectory of becoming a for-profit and not being “Open” in any serious sense of the word, I genuinely think market forces can absolutely pry open any chest they perceive as containing gold.

My personal conclusion is that you genuinely have to deal with human beings. Take federation for instance: we can try to decentralize these things and make an incredibly solid system, but we still depend on people coming to the realization that this is a good idea and adopting it for their personal/professional internet use.

Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company? I can’t think of anything beyond having subsidiaries in different countries, but that still requires a parent or at least a main point of contact in the form of the owner. So we’re back to humans.

To chime in on the user creation thing:

I think it’s a natural part of decentralization that it’s harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the “go-to” for general users.

Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it’s just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.

World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)

As someone else said, you have to remain 100% private. The second you become publicly traded, that’s it.

Even then, if you want to make a difference in an established industry, you all but require preexisting deep pockets or some extremely disruptive technology that can’t be easily copied.

You then have to remain steadfast in the face of the ridiculous money that will be dangled in front of you to be bought out.

There’s a lot of stars that need to align.

Hopefully this actually leads to something lasting, but I don’t have high hopes considering how Europe is getting dragged atm

Paper notebooks.

I fully believe we’ve come full circle in that technology was intended to sort out the mess of physical documents, bookkeeping etc, but now is inherently messier by itself and you should go back to pen and paper.

It really depends on the age of the sender.

30s and younger: Fairly dismissive response. Not outright insulting but pretty rude.

40s and older: genuinely meant as an earnest acknowledgement of your message.