It's not free, but it's pretty cheap. When you don't have to have massive marketing departments, huge management bonuses, expensive office space, crappy proprietary software, and massively scaled highly available platforms it costs a lot less to run a social media platform. Donations can often cover it all.
If one server gets too big, they can just cap registrations and people move to a different server.
No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That's nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.
Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn't need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.
This is a great move. Governance is extremely important for bigger OSS projects, and the "benevolent dictator" model has its limits.
Spock would have to be DM. As a player he'd be the worst rules lawyer ever.
I think the headline is misleading. He's not arguing that we should keep fossil fuels. He's saying we can't just switch to renewables and keep going on as we currently are. Which is exactly what environmentalists have been arguing for years.
I doubt it. His recent shows are Shrinking and Ted Lasso... Not exactly flops.
Unfortunately, AfD and Musk won't hesitate to paint this as an islamist attack. They'll just claim the X posts are fake if necessary.
It may even have been the attackers' goal.
I don't know if this is realistic. Considering making a game is a full time job.
The New Zealand Social Media Study did some analysis of fake news during the '20 and '23 election campaigns. They did a bit more in 2020, here are some of their results: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/hppi/psir/psir-research/election/facebook-campaign-communication
I had actually been planning a proposal for this fund for next year (social science). I'd sat through seminars on how to write a good proposal, and no one mentioned funding getting cut was even a possibility. The universities were completely blindsided.
It's a decision that seems to be driven purely by ideology, and mostly comes from one of the junior coalition partners (Act). I know for a fact that their leader has been expressing discontent about some of the research being done that has been criticising him (I.e. showing how his party spreads misinformation).
Yes, even the UK had to accept this when they were in the EU. But unfortunately it wasn't very proportional, due to the small districts. Plus no one paid attention to EU elections, so it didn't have much impact on politics (e.g. it didn't help win any arguments about changing voting systems).