Buying an electric vehicle does not make the world a better place, but buying and using a gas vehicle makes the world worse by a bigger margin, so if you're buying a vehicle, an electric vehicle is probably better.
Apple's biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.
I don't think any secret agent could rival any of those fictional characters. They have incredible plot armor, depending on the scenario. James Bond is an idiot who fucks every woman who moves, even when he knows they're there to trap him, but has a magic dick that hypnotizes them onto his side.
Batman with prep time is an unstoppable force who could take down every army in the world at once if he really needed to.
No, no human can compare to these characters.
Lol, yeah, this sociopath is going to develop a full suite of banking services and software in a year while laying off employees, sure.
He is an insurrectionist. See his political positions on wikipedia here. It's a well-sourced article. He also opposes
He's an extremist. They do not have the political power to elect an extremist from their ranks. They need a moderate.
Note, this doesn't work with any other (hypothetical) RCS clients, this is not a part of the RCS standard, it's a feature entirely proprietary to Google Messages.
I feel like the main reason it's a big deal is the fact that the front-facing fingerprint scanner sucks ass.
I don't think this is a "punishment." It seems rather foolish to expect them to supply electricity to the people actively using the electricity to kill their civillians.
People want to see more happening here. The fediverse is not quite the ghost town it was a year ago, but it's still pretty quiet, especially once you start digging into hobbies.
Of course, the good solution is not bot-driven, but human-driven. But people are lazy and think that they'd rather repost thousands of posts with a bot than figure out what links they think are good and post those.
Don't focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.
When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they're going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they're going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.
Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don't think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I've been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It's been frustrating, I haven't really been able to build the community up yet, but it's okay.
While we're at it, don't alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that... suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you're a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist... I'm not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.
And... I've done this too, but let's make sure that we're not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.
A TV journalist I know helped shed some light on this.
He used to write about one article a week. Usually a review, sometimes an article article.
Nowadays, they have him write about seven "articles" a week, but six of them are SEO-optimized factoids. You know, those articles where you're looking for the premiere date of a show, but they're six sections long, the premiere date is the last section, and the first five sections look kind of like they were written by a human who hates his job? Yeah. They make actual journalists write those, and they want them written well, because Google's idea of fixing the SEO race was to prioritize long articles and articles that look like they were written by humans.
So these articles are created by humans, they're churned out fast, and they have a few sections represented by headers that directly answer common search terms / questions. The more common the question, the further the answer is buried down in the article.
These articles aren't serious, so they expect you to get six of them done per week on top of your actual job, but they still want you to put effort in and write them well so they don't look like chatgpt garbage, and so that, when people click on them, a fraction of a percent of those people actually stick around on the website and look at more ads.
It's weird how much better Chromecast was when it came out than it is now. Stronger hardware, sure, but no real antifeatures, you could set it up without installing the app, you could use the app without giving it location data, casting was way more straightforward...