And what happens when those foreign workers in Solution #3 age, retire and need pension payouts...? Just keep hiring more and more foreign workers? Besides, "benefits everybody" is only from an national economic perspective. From the cultural, social and personal economic perspective, having a huge influx of foreigners in your country is terrible.

I don't think foreign labor is completely off the mark but there has to be guards against them costing more money than they contribute to the system, which means strict culture, skill and income requirements for permanent migration.

That's relieving to hear. I know the backstory of Kbin is that Ernest was originally a Lemmy contributor but he and Lemmy's devs got into a disagreement about politics, so he went to start his own project instead. There was no communication about the block from Lemmy's devs for a while so a lot of people, including me, theorized that it was related to the conflict.

I have two phones as daily drivers, one Android and one iPhone. Compared to Android, the iPhone is very restrictive and locked down. Adblockers don't work and you're forced to use whatever iOS interface it throws at you. Buttons and gestures move around with every update. There's no way to view and manage internal files, no sideloading, lots of options that are just not accessible to normal users.

The positive side is that iPhones are very optimized and I can get similar performance to my Android phone despite the iPhone being older and having worse specs. The closed ecosystem also has its benefits, because it makes data very hard to get out, so I use the iPhone as a device to sandbox all the Meta crap that I'm forced to use.

I brought up the social system because you can see that everyone in this thread arguing against you is saying that your "excellent welfare system" is the reason why your income is lower than the corresponding American programmer's. The massive taxation is obviously a big factor to your reduced income, but let's look away from that for a bit and just focus on the American companies.

American companies in America pay more because the costs of doing business in America are much lower and there is a greater availability of loans and funding.

American companies in Europe pay more because they have the advantages listed above that local European companies don't have and they have the resources to invest in a global expansion.

That's it. That's the answer.

It's difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn't give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.

If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don't recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.

I didn't expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I'm kind of glad for it.

I don't think that you, me and OP have different values on this issue, actually? We all agree that the state is supposed to provide us with a structure to live in that we couldn't have on our own, and as payment for this safety net, we contribute taxes. My and OP's argument is that with the current projection of the economy and population growth, the state cannot provide the current generation of tax payers with the structures and support that we will eventually need, and therefore many of us would rather pay lower taxes and lose the benefits, because we won't be getting them anyway. We know what's coming and we don't want to be the ones "holding the bag" when the system collapses.

I'm trying to explain OP's point to the Americans in this thread who don't understand that European social security systems are currently under severe strain and are on the road to collapse, and how OP feels to have to sacrifice so much of his potential income to support a failing system. The 80s stereotypes of reliable, high-quality social security no longer hold true in Europe in 2023.

Hate speech laws in real life are also very ambiguous and rarely stand alone in court without another more easily proven charge.

Upvote to you too anyway, although I'm still guilty of using downvote as a disagree button.

I'm not Danish (I'm the resident foreign invader on the instance), but if you are, you should come over to feddit.dk to complain with us. Privatization and the social system destroying itself is a hot topic right now.

I must admit though, the way you described your country made me think you were from Greece or somewhere that is bleeding citizens because its social systems are beyond salvaging at this point. Is the public pension in Denmark really unliveable? I would assume that it's much worse here in Sweden but old people are generally still able to get by.

I'm working on that one! Fork of lemmit.online, so it doesn't need API access.

Don't worry about it spamming instances. This bot posts so much that it will be automatically blocked from any instance that uses the default Lemmy rate limits, so all bot deployments will have to run on an instance that is specifically for them.

Source code for the bot will be released on July 1st if Reddit doesn't introduce a breaking change on that day and if I don't receive a good argument as to why this bot will destroy the Fediverse.

This instance is hosted in Germany, one of the countries with the strictest anti-piracy laws? Seems like a very risky decision (I'm aware that a lot of the good and affordable hosting providers are German).

Agreed, sort of. I use Bookwyrm but I don't get the appeal of "social reading". I don't discuss books with others because my taste in books is lame, my opinions are usually controversial among book enthusiasts and I would rather not have people looking at what I read. Bookwyrm is also apparently much more expensive to run per user compared to most federated services so I feel bad for costing the instance admin money. But I don't want to switch to a completely offline or personal instance because I like being able to sync across multiple devices and get book recommendations from the larger instance's database.

This comment also reminds me that my reading has been paused for several months and I should get back to it.

The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy's original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.

An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software's design, which I believe they are doing well.