You can dress it however you like, maybe even plead necessity, but what you can't do at the same time is say how democratic it is because this features exists (which they don't).

Edited for spelling.

At a guess, it's following older British norms, whereby a billion is what it is in other European languages (a million million) and a thousand million is a thousand million or, more pretentiously, a milliard. You'd have to ask the authors though.

Unfortunately this came conveniently too late.

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

Not so concerned on that--people being able to establish their tolerances for whom they want to talk to is fine with me. But if the system goes towards allowlists, it becomes more cliquish and finding a way in is more difficult. It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they're not handled another way.

It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

I run my instance and that's definitely not my experience. Which is of course not to say it can't be someone else's. But something, in my opinion not unimportant, is lost when it becomes harder to find a way in.

It's possible FF wouldn't get away with something like integrating ad blocking by default, but in no reasonable universe were they required to do the PPA stuff and turn it on by default. Nor is it clear that it will lead to websites caring about FF compatibility--unfortunately many already don't.

I don't have a complete solution, but I have a vector, and this is in the opposite direction, being, according to its own claims useful to advertisers.

The solution passes through many things, but probably has to start by changing the perception of advertising as a necessary nuisance and into a needless, avoidable, and unacceptable evil. Collaboration does not help in this regard. Individual actions such as blocking advertising, refusing to accept any tracking from sites, deploying masking tools, using archives and mirrors to get content, consciously boycott any product that manages to escape the filtering, are good but insufficient.

Yes, for example I donate to thunderbird since I find it useful. And I wouldn't mind donating to Firefox either provided they wouldn't do this sort of fuckery.

though in the long run we need to overturn capitalism of course, and that an economic model is viable doesn't mean we should sustain it or justify it.

Can't happen soon enough.

On my instance, the following control measures apply:

• Only public posts are visible through the web interface.
• Only public posts appear on RSS.
• Following requires approval.
• Authorised fetch is required.

So I think I have reason to feel fairly strongly that follower only posts are not public, and even unlisted posts are reasonably restricted.

But Ukraine is not a member. There is no reassurance required, or given, by NATO supplying non-members. In fact one could easily make the opposite claim: NATO depleting its own ammunition stores is doing the opposite of reassuring its members, by decreasing its own margins of safety.

It's not primarily the younger voters going fash though. Otherwise I mostly agree with your comment.

In spite of which, there's a pretty good chance that the government will change in the upcoming elections in July. There's been lots of good economic policy, but it isn't satisfying people.