E-mail providers allow you to use a custom domain, so if the one you’re using suddenly goes away, you can just point your DNS records at the new one and that’s it. If the ActivityPub instance you’re using suddenly goes away, you can say goodbye to your account.
Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same.
If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.
Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).
The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.
I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.
IIRC, the Inmos Transputer shipped without a C compiler, and while third party products (including a port of GCC) did come later, it was Occam-only for quite some time.
Some humans will very likely survive. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die.
Life as it has been known for hundreds of years will change dramatically.
An unwillingness or inability to conceive of this possible future as anything more than “it’ll be colder, but fine” would make it vastly worse for many people.
Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.
That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.
The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.
We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
As far as i know a large portion of what i described shutdown after it came to light, although i would not be the least bit surprised if it was still happening in some capacity, or even in full under the disguise of something else
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