Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I'm a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn't a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn't going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It's not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and "gateway," but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience ("Oh, my friends aren't on this Mastodon server thing? And we're not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh..."). Twitter and even Bluesky don't require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don't really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

The DNC has been later in August in the past, according to this page on wikipedia. Same goes for the RNC.

But I don't know if Ohio's law has always been this way or if it's newer. Either way, it sounds like in the past that various states have had provisions for this scenario, knowing that this could and did happen. So if I had to guess, the issue is that, like many things in our political system, we relied on traditions and cooperation to maintain the system. And of course, Republicans for the last 8yrs (longer than that, really) no longer want to do that. They'd rather see it all burn down in the name of DJT.

I thought the plane is supposed to be missing screws, not the passengers.

Yeah because I'm sure GM's shit will be better. Idek why I'm addressing this: ~~we all know GM doesn't want to pay Apple or Google~~. That this is really about more renting and never owning. They just want more money.

GM, just say that. We know you're a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don't have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We're not a bunch of idiots. We get it, even if you all suck for doing this.

I'd say I hope GM crashes and burns again, but then the government will just bail them out again.

FYI, you're on a Beehaw community right now. This type of needless aggression may be acceptable elsewhere, but not on Beehaw.

Has anyone heard of state governments getting involved in rescuing or evacuating Americans overseas? Typically seems like that's something the federal government, via the State Department does.

Not saying doesn't happen, but just never heard of it before. Maybe this is why.

I didn't think people torrented over TOR. Aside from the security issues (which I didn't know about in the first place), I would think it's gotta be insanely slow. Is it not?

I'm not gonna lie, I didn't expect the vote to succeed. This is surprising, shocking, and even a bit sad. Not for McCarthy, but more for the country. That this is where we've gotten to.

The weird part of that is the the amounts he's saying it would cost/time to re-run the test -- $100-500 (probably like that pay for a employee's day) -- are nothing in the context of a company. Especially one that was sold or offered $100million. My company run on like a $3million budget. A few hundred dollars is nothing to us. That's a staff lunch or our bar tab sometimes. If the retesting costs like $5000....OK, that's certainly something to pause and think about. But a few hundred? A day or half a day for an employee to re-do the test? That's too much?

Maybe to the average person, the average viewer, that sounds like a lot of money. But not to a business. Certainly not one as large as LMG.

This feels like wrestling "Kayfabe." Like, was this just some weird feint by Russia? Try to bait Ukraine into doing something? This would be a new level of gaslighting if so...

So strange.

Now hearing from Al Jazeera news and NYT that Prigozhin has agreed to order his Wagner troops back to their bases. What in the hell is going on?

That was Voat. Voat, feature-wise, was like a better reddit. But then they (I think it was like one guy administering the whole site) stuck to "freeze peach" and it quite quickly turned into a cesspool. Like on Day 1. And of course reddit tried that, too from time to time when it was convenient. But as soon as it was inconvenient, like when the media found out about the JB, FPH, etc subreddits, free speech was off the table.

Free speech - as it's understood in the US - concerns one thing: Governments. People literally have no free speech in any other regard; certainly not on privately owned/operated websites. Unless it's their own; and it's never their own, because no one would visit it.

I always wonder if these free-speech-people have ever tried yelling profanities or slurs at their boss or customers at work. The answer is of course they haven't for the vast majority, because they know that yelling back "FREE SPEECH!" wouldn't stop them from getting fired on the spot. But it's the same principle. So it's weird to me that people think they have some fantastical "right" online to get away with saying anything.