My highschool days. Wouldn't change a thing either, except I wouldn't start smoking cigarettes.

Removing his ability to play stocks at all is removing his ability to earn money. His investors will leave him and the interest on his loans will liquidate him. We've seen more than a few of his type flash up and fade away. Milken. Pickens. Belfort. And of course, Madoff. Just to name a few we know by a single name.

He would still be wealthier than 99.99% of people but then so are a lot of folks on the planet. That's 80 million people left over in that .01%. That's not all that powerful at all. It's removing him from the .00001% thats the goal. And killing his stock market abilities would do that over-night. It's why he bought Twitter, he had to because this was the alternative.

Twitter made 44 billion dollars. Pretty sure it didn't cost that much to run. Ergo Twitter made money.

That's the big hurdle. That's the big catch. Social media companies are contingent on speculation to drive profits. Facebook isn't worth what it is without speculative buying in the markets. Twitter, same story. That's where reddit is at, they want a payday and to move on. The funny thing is this same reasoning exposes just how awful a businessman Elon Musk is. Twitter is going to literally drive him from the top ten richest in the world list all on its own. Give it time.

The funnier thing is Steve Huffman is such a loser he is looking up to Elon in this past week. The guy wants so desperately to be able to buy popularity like Elon did.

TIL Voat shut down. Shocker.

Thing is the next guy can't actually invigorate them because it's DeSantis. Or Ted Cruz, whom I suspect will actually end up with the nomination. DeSantis is a shitbag but he's entirely lacking in the crowd pleasing department. MAGA diehards are all that's left and they hate him already. Then there's Cruz, who will be a direct opposite to that brand - trying to sell himself as a moderate. Real hard to get people excited about that, and they've spent a decade or more undercutting that exact platform. Plus he's Ted Cruz. Dude is a total loser to every side.

The brand of ego maniac that creates a Trump isn't common enough for Republicans to just spin up a new one. We've watched them try time and again the last 8 years and it's laughable how badly it goes for them. I disdain Trump but I can recognize that aspect clearly. The guy was massively and mainstream popular for decades prior to his presidency across multiple, huge platforms. He was already a household name, no one had to ask who he was. That's what it took.

Republicans know it too, it's why they've still been backing him and not going on the direct offensive - yet.

Fun fact! COVID gave us a huge dataset of faces with masks on. Facial recognition software beats masks now with 99% accuracy.

Mask up seditionists, you'll be fine! Trust me!

Most human like thing about it yet, in fact.

Google Power Delete Suite. Don't leave your content there for them to use.

He's already overridden people blocking him. You still see his posts.

He's just trying to make sure it stays useful as a weapon for fascists like himself is all.

New? Never left. Piracy is mainstream. People stream things all day from all kinds of shady streaming sites, but they get to watch what they want.

Just be an American trying to watch Australian television. Pain in the ass to find anywhere but my wife finds stream links on Facebook -- Piracy is mainstream.

Which by the way, if you ever enjoyed the show Survivor, Australian Survivor is actually better. It's my guilty pleasure. Australian Survivor is on a whole other level.

Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, and others are all "federated apps" connected to ActivityPub. They are just different UIs to connect to it, so you can see posts and content from one on the others.

Mastodon is a UI inspired by Twitter.

Lemmy is a UI inspired by reddit. It is more stable but less feature rich. You can get native apps just like with reddit, such as Jerboa (similar to rif).

Kbin is a UI inspired by reddit. It is more feature rich and less stable (said to be, anyway).

They are all speaking the same protocol though. So while you can load Mastodon posts in this Lemmy ui they might look ... off. Similarly you can load things in Mastodon from kbin etc and they too might seem weird. It's because they're not giving the same context you might get viewing that content in the UI it was made for.

These are all still new with Mastodon being the one most widely adopted already. So expect better features and bug fixes to roll out over time. Especially with so much more demand now, I'm guessing many old 3PA devs have already been working out new tricks for ActivityPub.

The thing you're describing about smugness is kind of an overarching problem with tech literate people in general. Reddit began with a large portion of the users being those tech folks. They were also libertarians. This narrated the early culture, which led to the latter devolution. Keep in mind even today on reddit there were folks fondly remembering subs like jailbait, which was a top sub for years. They got downvotes but they were still there because they used to have a home there.

The federated system got its first big migration during Elon's initial takeover of Twitter. That drove a certain left-wing element here early on, which hopefully will help establish a different culture going forward.

The other thing is that it's inevitable with any community that a critical mass of shit happens. The bots, the cyber soldiers, the propaganda, the spam and the sex workers show up at a certain threshold. Whether the fediverse can effectively manage that remains to be seen.