This drives me nuts. Why do his moronic cult followers keep giving him money? He's a "billionaire." LOL

From what I've read, the troll farms mostly operate funded by Russia but are physically located outside of Russia. For example, Macedonia had quite a few.

That's actually really good thing. In the U.S. not wanting to kill trans people makes you a "far left" person according to right-wingers. real "far left" people are pretty nuts, man. The vast majority of us are moderates who are now labeled as "far left" in the U.S. political discourse.

Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.

As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.

I've been using Mastodon since Twitter was taken over by Musk, so I'm not a super long-term user, but I can give my perspective:

Platforms like kbin / lemmy are more like "topic" communities. Like people on kbin create "magazines" and on lemmy they are actually "communities". From the user perspective, you can just look for these communities you are interested in and sign up to get updates from them.

Platforms like Mastodon are more like you and specific people you like to see content from. So you find people you like to hear from and you follow them to get their updates. They may post on subjects you aren't interested in but oh well, that's up to them.

Both formats can produce desirable, tight-knit communities, but they just use different structure. In my opinion, the kbin / lemmy style is more accessible in terms of finding people interested in a specific subject but feels less personal since you are just all there to talk about a specific subject. On Mastodon, when I find people posting content I like, I end up learning more about the random nonsense they are interested in. Like my feed there has a ton of moose pictures now because one person I followed likes to post pictures of moose. I don't mind seeing them, but I never expected to see so many moose.

TLDR: Mastodon is about following people, kbin / lemmy are about following topics.

Exactly. There's a reason Apple products are so successful. Apple does a fantastic job of hiding away unnecessary details and giving users a very slick, polished interface that usually does what they want. I'm not even a person who buys any Apple products.

Well they mention Github artifacts in that message so it sounds like it's more like they may have obtained source code and that sort of non public stuff.

Usually what happens is that these sorts of blackmailers will leak small, verifiable pieces of data so people know they really got something. We don't see that here, so for now there's no reason to take them seriously yet.

This isn't ransomware. This is standard blackmail.

The head wobble doesn't have one simple meaning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gbrB8KwES4

I worked for many years with someone from south India and he would do the head wobble so over the years he tried to explain it. I still don't fully understand it. Haha

Boosts are like retweets and Upvotes are like likes. On a threaded discussion format like this, boosts are kind of pointless, so nobody uses them.

I had a couple of Motorola phones back in the day. Most recently I had a Moto Z2 Force, which had a shatterproof screen. I really liked that because around then I had my first kid and kids cause accidents all the time. LOL