That is why American-run commercial social networks are inherently not viable if you care about user focus. Any rational adult (of any nationality, from US to Botswana) can make their own conclusions regarding US-run commercial social networks over the past ~20 years.

I deleted Twitter a while ago and switched to Mastodon, I did not move to Bluesky when it started getting big exactly because I knew their initial user-focus was a ruse (and their federation architecture seemed top heavy).

Trump is a bigger national security concern than fucking TP-Link and no one in power is seriously talking about removing him.

There is an abstract ironic beauty to this.

I don't have any stats to back this up, but I wouldn't be surprised if failure rates were higher back in the 90s and 2000s.

We have much more sophisticated validation technologies and the benefit of industry, process and operational maturity.

Would be interesting to actually analyze the real world dynamics around this.

While I agree with your message at a high level (I quit FB several years ago), I don't think it's productive to be so abrasive.

It's generally better to be respectful and convincing if you want to change minds.

I think you can effectively compete with China but you would need a giant coalition of democratic countries that would move fast and stay focused.

With oligarchs completely taking over the US, this is unlikely to happen. But that's hardly the sole roadblock to such a coalition.

Without Frame Generation, the gen-on-gen increase in performance is relatively modest (by historical standards for GPUs). Just 20% improvement between a 4070 and 5070.

I got on this on Windows 10 too.

At first I thought I got a virus or something, but then realized this was some ASUS bullshit.

I think by this point, the only option is breakup and mandatory federation with independent frontends, service providers all competing against each other. They have a monopoly.

Google would argue they don't really have a monopoly since they compete against streaming, but that's a malicious, pre-information age interpretation of monopoly power.

Good to hear at least some upside for Mastadon from the recent rise in Bluesky users.

Hopefully this trend will continue and and Mastodon can retain at least a solid percentage of those why try it.

Sounds like they feel they have enough leverage over US companies where they can keep the leading edge node "exclusive" to in-country manufacturing.

And they do have very strong leverage.

I lived in North America for ~10 years, the whole time I still converted miles / pounds / fahrenheit into real units in my head.

To this day, feet/yards etc. sounds like made up measures to me.

To implement something like this, you would need a radical change in judicial and criminal systems.

Something along the lines of any white collar crime worth more than say 10 annual local median salaries, would require a rehabilitation program (if convicted) that would start with full asset seizure (absolutely everything) and a minimum of 10 years real community service (live-in junior janitor at an Alzheimer's outpatient institution with minimum wage and limited access to internet and smartphones). The community service could easily be extended to 20, 30 or 40 years depending the on the severity of the crime.

You would also need to get rid of various "get out of jail free" laws and make it easy to organized criminals and send them to rehabilitation programs.