The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there’s nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.

Then using that for spam/selling block chain etc.

People are the reason we can’t have nice things.

What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.

This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.

How you can have an article talking about the history of email and it not be about Ray Tomlinson, I just don’t know. Wait - now I know: This person looked up the Wikipedia article on the smtp protocol and decided Mr. Postal was the pioneer of email.

The conclusion is completely incorrect, also. About the only correct thing was that reputation is important for email transmission.

No: you can’t just set up an smtp outbound server on your home server and expect the world to trust you. For good reason: we’ve had decades of trojans and viruses taking over home PCs and sending spam. Your ISP declares its “home” IP ranges, and those are immediately not trusted.

That doesn’t mean you need to use a big email hosting provider. If you set up on a business IP range, configure your DNS Correctly with declared mx and spf records, the world will trust you (until you demonstrate that it can’t).

Millions of businesses around the world do this.

After middling success putting a modern take on simple rock beats, they renamed the band to The Wiggles and specialized on childrens entertainment.

Through a combination of record companies wanting nothing to do with them, and a willingness to tour in the wake of the World Trade Center attack when nobody else would, the new band becomes wildly successful and gets to keep all their own money and not share it with a record company.

(True Story)

As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they’d never get in.
2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren’t forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. “You can’t make me vote, that’s against the constitution or something”.

True, but we are speaking about what people want, not how they voted.

I suspect that the majority of voters never wanted to leave in the first place. Results-wise, there was like 1.2% in it. And the leave voters were more likely to actually turn up. The problem is that too many “remainers” didn’t actually vote.

The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.

I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?”

I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.

I’m not sure whether this is actually a cool guide, or how an Australian thinks of US regions. But this map mostly aligns with my impressions of the USA. So, it may well be a pretty good guide.

There is nothing that I want to watch badly enough that I would put up with this behavior.

If it were a state in Australia, it would be our third-smallest.

That’s more a statement on the USA’s tiny states than anything specific against Texas though.

£1,212 is more like $1,500 US dollars. Which is nuts.

I think I take exception to the adjective “bad” in the title. Failing after 45+ years in service is pretty damn good, I think.

The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.

It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.

I actually love Civ IV, myself. I’m sure Leonard Nemoy is a huge part of why.

My wife, with a PhD applying for jobs 15 years ago:
“You’re stupidly over-qualified for this entry-level job, we fear that you will leave us as soon as you get a better offer.”
or
“You have the qualifications for his role, but you lack previous experience.”

I should probably know this, but why “threadverse” and not “fediverse”? The name Threadverse sounds like a Meta trademark.