Yes, that's clear. I didn't mean to imply that anyone here is getting paid, except for the operators of instances and Foss developers—and they presumably get far too little for their efforts.

Yes, ads would be unavoidable, but there would be the possibility of distributing the revenue more fairly. Otherwise, the only option would be to accept donations to accounts, but no one would likely use that. I'll say it again: ads are not an option in the Fediverse, not even in a transparent way, and not even though ads not only finance the internet, but have also traditionally been a major source of funding for things like quality journalism (subscriptions have never been the main source of income here). Nevertheless, it remains a fact that good content costs time and skill, and therefore usually money. Without monetization methods, there will always be a shortage of content that is more than just reposts from elsewhere. So it seems to me to be an unsolvable problem. But of course, I also completely understand why the Fediverse fundamentally rejects monetization—at least in the form of ads.

That's the downside of having few users. In terms of basic principles, Lemmy is no different from other social media apps: The lion's share just consumes, few comment, hardly anyone posts anything. In fact, it's anything but a community approach, but rather the merit of a few "power users" who provide the vast majority of the content.

In addition, there are no monetization opportunities whatsoever. Many people see this as a good thing, which is understandable, but in fact there are perfectly normal people who try to make a living from their content or at least want to earn some extra money. I don't think there will ever be any understanding for this on this platform. Therefore, there will never be such content here, because without monetization opportunities, there is no motivation to provide such content here instead of on mainstream social media platforms. I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable, but this will fail from the outset due to ideology.

I think that's a shame, but I think there is 0 chance this could even be discussed in the Fediverse.

That's true, but now with the same argument that the US has legitimized, on an unprecedented scale. Not that this is any kind of justification, but once again it is the US that is making it possible - by preventing UN sanctions against this criminal state.

The glaring inconsistency lies in the fact that terrorists are not states against which one can wage war. This means that there are no regular armies fighting each other, but only one (usually vastly superior) army that arbitrarily decides which targets to attack and who to kill, which is not warfare, but the killing of arbitrary targets with arbitrary justification. This fundamentally flawed thinking was normalized during the occupation of Afghanistan under this pretext. It means nothing more than the right of the stronger party to do whatever it wants because it is supposedly fighting evil, which does not wear uniforms but hides among the civilian population, who are thus always under general suspicion of also being terrorists.

You say it's okay when the US does it, but when anyone else does it, it's an atrocity? You also say that the extreme disproportion between the victims of such an asymmetrical conflict would be acceptable. You do realize that Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine in the same way, right? And you really don't see how absurd that is?

The only thing that could possibly top that is claiming that a country has weapons of mass destruction in order to destroy it, even though that country has no weapons of mass destruction at all - remember that US invasion? What I'm getting at is this: finding reasons for war that obscure the true intentions and coming up with justifications for extremely brutal actions is a specialty of the US. Another current example: the cold blooded murder of Venezuelan citizens in violation of international law – this time not on the grounds that they were allegedly terrorists, but on the grounds that they were allegedly drug dealers.

Oh, hey, yes, you're right, there's that too: the US also invented the concept of the "war on terror", which has now been adopted by Israel, for example, to justify the genocide of the Palestinians. It's really handy when you can just "excuse" the cold-blooded murder of thousands upon thousands of civilians with the argument that they are all supposedly terrorists. All you have to do is say, hey, they're harboring terrorists, so let's kill them all, including the women and children - the more we kill, the better, because once they grow up, they'll all be terrorists.

I find it quite strange that "old and weird" seems to work better than "corrupt and criminal".

A system that appoints supreme constitutional judges for life and without even halfway serious democratic checks and balances seems to me the perfect recipe for disaster and corruption. But hey, I'm from Europe, so what do I know... ¯_(ツ)_/¯