Die extreme Rechte profitiert von verzweifelten Menschen. Soziale Netze abbauen ist eine sehr schlechte Strategie.
Selling railway infrastructure to car manufacturers is generally a bad idea. That's how the car industry contributed to killing public transportation in the US.
Public transport is their competition. Killing it brings profit. Very simple logic.
It serves a purpose. But an evil one: stopping journalists from reporting on US war crimes
The rape story was part of a mud campaign. It was made up and the world fell for it. What happens here is: A journalist publishes proofs of US war crimes. And the war criminals (US gov) come after him because of exactly that. Their message is clear: who ever reports on our crimes will be destroyed. This is a fight against press freedom and against the democratic freedom as we think to know it.
https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange
Pessimists know the "rebound effect": improvement in efficiency leads us to do more of the thing. More illumination for example. This (partially) counteracts the good effects.
Vielleicht grundsätzlich nicht so eine gute Idee, sich in eine so schwere Abhängigkeit von einem launischen und anti-demokratischen Milliardär zu werfen.
It is completely creepy. Think about who is behind Open AI. That's a mixture of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (Palantir), Microsoft and others. A right-wing, anti democratic, anti-human and purely profit oriented group. The name "Tools for Humanity" is complete sarcasm. What they do with Worldcoin smells like a modern attempt of colonization. Collecting biometry, subverting critical infrastructure (financial systems), making fake promises, blinding poor people with shiny metal balls and a little bit of money in some cases.
This can be stopped though! The Kenyan government apparently banned the project - for good.
$25 million? That's ridiculously cheap.
This sounds really bad and I'm afraid it's even worse than it sounds. For example, end of 2022 Italy introduced a law which bans certain types of harmless assemblies (rave parties) of more than 50 people (participants can be put to jail for up to 6 years). This is paving the road for cutting possibilities of people to protest against their government. (Imagine, there is a a protest and somebody plays music. The government will see a rave party.) Yet the Italian government seems to have no problem with 3000 neofascists visiting the hometown of Mussolini. And now this.
Spontaneous idea of how to use copyright law for keeping Meta out of the Fediverse (more for fun):
Introduction: Parts of the Fediverse, including Mastodon, are software licensed under the APGL license. This license is a great choice because it forces the ones running the software to grant users access to the source code. GPL for example would allow to run proprietary services based on GPL code. The AGPL does not. Companies like Meta and Google will likely not use AGPL code because it might force them to also publish their proprietary systems behind the scenes. However, this does not help much for keeping the Fediverse save. They simply implement their own software which will not be open source.
Therefore we may need another approach. Defederating is the simplest and in my opinion currently the best. It's easy and keeps people in control.
However, there could be some 'automatic' approach using copyright law. It's a hack which allows to use existing law to regulate the way instances can federate.:
Open question is, who owns the copyright of X?
Those sympathies with a fascists are alarming and should make people worry much more than the Reddit-drama itself. Anybody cares about that?
gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software "forgejo" for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.