The iPhone was the first smartphone that hot insanely popular. It launched the app store model that’s now used on every mobile platform including Android. Those apps have gotten hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India and China who are doing e-commerce and opening small businesses from their phones. That’s food on the table for the working class. They can earn money while looking after their children because they’re not chained to a desktop computer for internet access. People in remote areas can know instantly about natural disasters and the news, educating them and making them active citizens in a democracy.

People across the world can chat with each other for nearly free using messaging and social media apps, and won’t have to send letters or pay extra fees for long-distance calls. The iPhone got more people onto what formerly only Blackberry-owning business executive had.

It’s such a first world thing to belittle the impact of smartphone (an industry which the iPhone shaped tremendously), when it has so much tangible impact, especially to working people.

It’s just extra seasoning.

See, this falls apart when there’s another instance that focuses on solarpunk. When some communities on that instance become more popular and active than the communities in your local instance, you’d want to be subscribed to the solar punk communities on that new instance too. Now, your local feed is only showing you solarpunk communities hosted on slrpnk.net but not solarpunk communities on other instances. This distinction is not meaningful because where a community is hosted can be totally detached from the content. The users you know by handle can also be very active, if not more active, on other instances talking about solarpunk than slrpnk.net.

Unique interests can be already be self-curated by subscribing to certain communities. All apps have the subscribed feed. There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.

Edit: typo

Why did the UK refuse?

It’s an example of one company coercing another to enshittify for revenue. Getty also gets the blame here.

• Google Image Search removing the ability to go directly to the raw image after Getty complained that web users are bypassing its website and therefore not generating traffic
• Facebook removing chronological feed
• Facebook showing you pages that you never followed on your home feed without the ability to turn this off
• Microsoft trying to introduce ads to Explorer and the start menu
• Microsoft making it difficult to create a local Windows account by making the process unintuitive, leading the user to believe that a Microsoft account is needed to use Windows
• Apple dropping support for iOS web apps because it doesn’t want to support browsers other than Safari
• Reddit and Twitter’s ban of third-party API use that killed nearly all third-party clients
• EA producing games that require users to be always online, despite the game being single-player, presumably as a DRM measure
• Ad companies making it easy for you to give consent to data sharing and selling but really difficult for you to opt-out

Edit: More examples

I don’t like the normalizing of using “woke” to describe progressives.

CNN++?

Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?

Oh, how thoughtful.

Lol fuck Elon. Leave and divest.

What a clickbait title. It’s just a generative AI that turns meme images to short videos. Big deal.

I think you missed the point here. To the believer, evidence is not the main concern. Many Christians talk about their connection and relationship with god, which is subjective. To them, god exists because they have faith, not evidence, that it exists. Where’s that faith coming from? As many others explained in this thread, it’s about finding the sense of community and comfort in knowing that somebody higher us knows best in the world of uncertainty.

Good bot by not doing your job.

Google Talk

How does your native tea taste?

I just learned what had become of two franchises I loved, Rollercoaster tycoon and Simcity. It seems to me that they have been leeching off classic and successful IPs, filling them with microtransactions and making cheap idle games for profit.

But thousands of years of use in practice, so that says something.

Could be placebo

Not everyone has that choice. Living where you live prevents upward mobility.