Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I've been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

Isn't that too complicated for no reason? Just keep them under public control. No need to incentivise anyone, no need to share dividends to anyone.

It's the be-all end-all justification for anything

Yes Conversations is still a paid app on Play Store. The F-Droid version also doesn't support Google cloud notifications so some message notifications will go missing occasionally. For Android there's also Quickly which is a Conversations fork and aTalk which works OK but reminds me of 90s Windows software. It's still quite usable though. Honestly Conversations is totally worth the money if only for the amount of effort gone into modernising the platform which also a testament to its extensibility.

I tried to pay something with Bitcoin instead of debit card a couple of years ago. The transaction took ~4 hours to clear and that's with fees totalling about 40% of the amount. Granted the original amount was like $10 but still way too slow and way too expensive. I understand that technically credit cards are not instant too, but there's an intermediary that guarantees that the amount has been reserved until the bank clears your payment. I wasn't expecting Bitcoin to be instant but 4+ hours is excessive.

That's 2-3 years ago so my experience might be outdated.

I doubt it was accidental, that's standard tech corp playbook. Build on established technology or open standard,, then shut the gates when critical mass has been achieved.

Adulthood means being excited for a new mattress!!

Yes, I feel "social media" (or whatever this engagement driven, algorithmically fed hellscape can be called) is driving up the responses. We know, by now, how adversely social media affect the mental well-being of children, being bombarded all the time by the fantastic lives of plastic "influencers". Add to that cyber-bullying 24/7 which is now common, peer pressure for "green and blue bubbles" and a ton of other nonsense you can probably understand how people in a age bracket that there's chance of being parents might feel negatively about today's technological status quo.

I've been using RSS since before Google Reader was a thing. It's a fantastic way to monitor new papers in journals as almost all journals have been providing a feed since forever. I could go with a self-hosted option but I just ended up using Inoreader although I will probably migrate again. They used to have some entry level plans at some $20/yr but it looks like they are on their way out.

There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate

Same problem trying to upload a 17 kB avatar

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data