That really depends on which philosophy you subscribe to.

The TL;DR is that existential and post-modern philosophy say it’s varying degrees of relative, while everything anyone said before ~1800 was saying that facts were immutable.

One fact I can glean is that the data itself may be real (e.g., the wavelengths of light that hit your eyeballs) but the perception is a composite illusion of our mind (e.g., the fact that you just saw a kitty).

It’s the emergence of a new community. When things get big, people feel less individually responsible, and that’s how trouble starts.

You’re forgetting the future stages:

• holy crap! im autistic
• hey everyone, im autistic
• okay, i guess it just explains everything
• nobody seems to care that much
• alright, i’ll go find a good-paying tech/accounting/science job now
• proud to be ASD, if anyone cares

This will be funny how bad it’ll go. I expect ridiculous blocking coming.

Then come the AI bots who comment…

Right wing? Money is a pretty nonpartisan matter.

Most of the right-wingers have already fled off to Gab, MeWe, or Mastodon.

I don’t think so. FLOSS devs never seem to attract FLOSS designers. I’d love to collab with them, but they all seem to like designing not-FLOSS things.

You’ll always have to rely on someone else, unless you build the thing yourself.

The beauty of the fediverse concept is that it’s about as easy as possible to build it yourself.

The cost of running a host is a matter of economical management:

• It costs almost nil to run text-based content.
• Images take a bit of memory and bandwidth, but are even manageable with an old cellphone under a set number of users.
• Videos are a major drag, and very expensive unless you’re embedding them.

Most open-source is funded as passion projects by devoted geeks who typically already make a living doing other computer things anyway, and fediverse is a bit of the same.

In all fairness, that’s how Twitter did things from what I can understand.

Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.

I’m sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?

I may be speaking in defense of something I don’t know, but I don’t see a direct problem with other apps (e.g., Threads, Twitter if they change up what they’re doing) to start talking with the fediverse.

The bigger problem is when they start throwing their weight around. The W3C (and groups like Mozilla) have had many strong battles with Google trying weird stuff because they’re the biggest guys in the room (e.g., FLoC).

As long as we can rally behind the loyalist FLOSS geeks, we’ll always be alright.

This plays out like things I’ve seen in real life:

1. Get a community/club/church/workplace going with a good set of leaders.
2. The system becomes unwieldy through bureaucracy, excessive rules, whatever.
3. Leadership can’t change it, so they storm off in a huff after nobody listens to them.
4. Power-mongering Assistant to the Regional Manager takes their shot to run the show.
5. Everything becomes awful.