Its so much less cool than that.

Business leaders have finally gotten the legal oversight landscape set up so the cash register is being monitored by a blind baby that was dropped on its head, so they’re all just lining up robbing the place.

The end-game plan seems to be to keep it up until things go all Mad Max, then hide in underground vaults until that blows over and start it again.

Good point! Everyone that sees the news on this is either going to already be using Plex or not internalize it because it isn’t relevant to them.

It seems like they’re jumping through an awful lot of hoops to bamboozle some tiny number of potential customers that happen to be in the market for self-hosted media streaming right then at the time of the announcement of the end of the lifetime subscription.

This seems to be correlated with a lack of exposure to reality in the professional work, as alluded to in the article.

The sciences that are not mathematics involve the world as it is, with every effect having a cause and vice versa. Mathematics is a big language with a lot of testable and reproducible rules, but there is nothing anywhere in science that I am aware of that even approaches explaining why those rules are what they are-- they’re the immutable laws of reality right there for all to see and confirm, and they just “are”.

I think that because the human mind seems to abhor an unanswerable question, phenomena like this that are so far from being explained really lend themselves to the “it must be God” explanation.

I think that’s trying to solve the wrong problem.

If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.

While that’s true, I don’t believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.

The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.

I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven’t ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven’t seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!

Their competitors are on a rocket propelled ride to the dumps. If they want to exceed them, they need only release security fixes and nothing else.

What they’re doing instead is trying to out-garbage them, which is impossible. Everybody got a plan to out-garbage Microsoft til they get Windows 11ed in the face.

You could self host it anyway and just wait for the slow boil over at Discord to make the case for you. Surely they have only just begun making it worse.

There is no Mastodon service. Its an application anyone can download and run. I understand your frustration, but it seems like you’re mad at the universe they exist in for its role in housing them.

There is no Mastodon for them to be blocked on in the sense you’re talking about.

Mastodon is similar in setup to Lemmy in that nobody owns it and anyone can run it. I am absolutely positive they are banned on tons of Mastodon servers and not banned on tons of others. If the server you are on is federated with even one server with one that isn’t banned, you could potentially see their posts, at which point you can either report those posts to your and their admins, or block them yourself.

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