I think we're saying the same thing. Most people don't necessarily [functionally] have the option (or at least don't think they do, there are sometimes ways through.)
But, public hospitals with low or no cost care exist in some of these places, and from my observation, I do currently think it's a contributing factor to why small businesses are more likely to exist. But, it's only one knob to turn.
My current read of the situation is similar. If you go to other countries, there are slews of small shops, even in run down areas. On top of that, in places within Asia, the malls are also open and full of regional chains. It also feels like there's such a wider variety of certain goods available, because the little bakeries are doing their own thing, while in the U.S. seemingly everybody is eating Costco danishes.
"Passive income brain" people are not the only one's trying to "build revenue engines," that same sort of talk exists in corporate America. There are already people that that own companies which are there "to generate passive income for me," right now--there's a whole class of millionaires and billionaires that don't have to work. Passive income people didn't ruin the "content quality of the entire internet" and are far from the only ones doing so. Many of these folks are likely the ones that would have owned a hardware store if America didn't ignore it's regulatory duties while preaching about how "important" small business is.
In the U.S. situation really seems to have fossilized into a few big players/platforms, and they continue to freeze up through the process of things like private equity roll-ups. There's a thread on the front page right now about Amazon's alleged price-fixing tactics, which hurt customers and small businesses. Further: Real-estate is an investment, so for most being able to pay commercial rents is a pipe dream. Healthcare is tied to employment, so people are less free to try and start something other than "on the side."
American's choose "convenience" when shopping and to put people in power that serve these large companies or their owners, not small businesses or communities. Dropshipping, creating a "sweaty startup," etc... it's all just people trying to make do within the system they're trapped in.
Things like FreeTube and NewPipe let you keep a subscription list, even if you watch the videos elsewhere.
Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)
Very similar situation. I could even see information being sent to the recovery email. So, when the time came to setup my business, I chose Zoho and avoid Google whenever possible.
> The proposer of the idea needs to nurture it and part of that is defending it.
Some people are focusing on the first sentence, but I think this part is key. Obviously, if it's a good idea and you're putting in the work, that's probably a good direction. Critique is useful, defending an idea can help prevent you from being blindsided and help to hone your vision.
One of the things a lot of people seem to struggle with is knowing when it's worth it to keep going and when to let go. When working on something, there can be a lot of people coming from all sides saying, "this won't work," "this will work if you just stick with it", "actually, you're just missing X." There's a lot of noise, and the pushback can be fairly cliche at times.
Sometimes, things like you've mentioned like lack of experience will block them. But, depending on how strongly somebody feels about a concept, when they don't necessarily know if it's a good idea, they may just nurture it and see how everything plays out. It's okay if some things fail.
There was another new account basically created for this thread that got flagged down. Yours, which also looks like it was created for this thread, seems awful similar. (Edit: iirc even the name was similar.)
While I'm sure they do want those abilities, I follow the new tab often that I disagree. And frankly, I don't really have any reason to trust what you're peddling.
It doesn't feel like you can stay on topic here. I'm not trying to discuss the general viability of these platforms vs. centralized ones, or other social networks. Your complaint was:
> the people on it are just so far away from what me (and men my age) deem interesting and seem to be hostile to anything that doesnt fit their very restrictive ideals.
Okay. If you don't want to participate, don't. But, if your other comment about wanting to see a more diverse audience join was honest, then do. Either way.
There's traction. There's a user base. There are people enjoying and getting use out of it. There's plenty of communities and relationships that will go on just fine regardless of what you decide.
You seem to be frustrated about something, maybe that the fediverse isn't matching Facebook in size? It won't. It probably can't, since the commercial incentives aren't there. But, at no point does that invalidate what exists.
I don't know why your dragging centralization/decentralization, business model, Fairphone, etc. into the conversation now. It sort of feels like you're overthinking this.
I often talk to people about Signal irl, most download the app but some folks do. Some people actually want a For You feed and will bounce off Loops, Mastodon, or whatever. That's all fine. These spaces can have content about cars or guns or whatever else without eating the entire world.
You said:
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
Again, I think lots of people who are already in the Fediverse want that. But, if everybody who likes cars decides they won't join in until somebody who shares content about cars does, that car community may never show up.
You seem to have interests that you feel are undeserved. Just... regularly share things about what you think is cool. Just do it for funsies.
If you really feel strongly about wanting to make a diverse space, cross promote your stuff in spaces with other people who have the same interests. Share a post, share a video, ask them to follow you. Maybe even start an instance dedicated to the topic if that's your vision.
Just a side note, reading through some of the other comments, it sounds like Loops specifically isn't currently open source and the intent is to open source it at some later date.
I don't know about Loops specifically, but generally [Fediverse][0] projects tend to:
- Not rely on a central server.
- Allow you to set up your own server.
- Connect to a web of other servers through the Activity Pub protocol.
- Allow you to modify policies on your server (including restricting which other servers information is shared with.)
Many are also open source.
The creator of Loops also built a different project called [Pixelfed](1) with a focus on decentralized photo sharing (although it can also host video.) Because all these projects speak the same protocol, it's possible that at some point, Loops could show content from Pixelfed. Apparently Loops content is already appearing in Mastodon.
Meta's Threads also has Activity Pub support. Hypothetically, Threads content could appear on Loops and vice versa, if the UI is built to accommodate that style of content and a server admin doesn't block the Threads server (many servers block Threads specifically.)
TL;DR: A web of servers using different pieces of open source software to share social media, without a centralized server.
> I want loops/mastodon to be a diverse place that has content from all over the internet.
I think a lot of Fedi people want that, but the community is still small. It's a bit of a chicken and egg, so I would encourage you to create the content or communities you want to see.
I don't have a Loops account, but check multiple sites for news and information, landing on the loops homepage several times. I haven't needed a login to see videos appear for some time.
If it's anything like the rest of the Fediverse applications, it's meant to give you a full chronological feed of people you subscribe to. While several of these sites seem to have a simple trending page, one of the themes of the Fediverse seems to be getting away from overly predatory algorithms and leaning into letting people curate their own feeds and interactions again.
It sounds a lot like a "be the change" situation. If you want to see other stuff, follow people you like instead of drinking from the hose. It's still a small site, so if you don't see the content you want, then make it or build the community there.
These sites can also have basic interoperability. I don't know if the Loops UI supports subscribing to people in other Fedi networks yet, but I've seen people say Loops videos have started trickling onto Mastodon.
If we've concluded that's it's okay to have elements that change/morph, as we seem to with the introduction of things like details, a native tab-like element feels like a glaring omission. Tabs have been a long-standing UI pattern and forcing every site to implement their own is a nightmare for accessibility. (The page you're reading is maybe already in a browser tab.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page?
Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.
People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.
I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.
From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.
I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.
The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.
But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.
Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.
That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.
I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.