I just don’t see how Burgum can differentiate himself enough from Trump or Desantis. I think he’ll probably be a “rising star” of sorts in the early phase of the primary - I could see a decent chunk of Iowa votors being willing to vote for a prairie state R. I just don’t know how he makes it much further from there.
That said, if his goal is to just get a cabinet position, none of that really matters.
At some point when I was a teenager, I bought a super cheap calligraphy pen kit at some hobby store. It was incredibly flimsy, the pen cracked within like a month, but I thought it was super coot to be writing with a fancy-shmancy fountain pen (and a stub nib no less!). But that was kinda it for a while once I burned through the three ink cartridges it came with.
Then, maybe a year later, I stumbled upon Baystate Blue and was like OMG LOOK HOW BLUE THAT IS and had to buy it and a real fountain pen to experiment with it.
Many things were stained in the process. I have no regrets.
Ahhh, been trying to figure this out all day! Thanks for this
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if they decided to kill it sooner rather than later. Restricting mobile access even further indicates to me that they're probably trying to get all their negative press out of the way as quickly as possible.
/r/fountainpens was one of the best! That said, I've been impressed with how active [email protected] has been so far
I think you are definitely right that there will wind up being some degree of centralization, even in the Fediverse, but I think the issue will be far less severe than the one we find ourselves in right now.
The fact of the matter is that it takes some degree of skill and willingness to devote time and resources to complete strangers in order to host a Lemmy instance, which will probably result in there only being a handful of "big" instances where the vast majority of communities are located. These instances could theoretically be bought, sold, and neglected, and potentially face the same conclusion as Reddit, bringing down whatever communities they happen to host.
However, the difference here is that some communities would be unaffected in that scenario. Suppose that Instance A were to go off the rails, taking with it for example the Lemmy equivalents of /r/gifs, /r/politics, and /r/gaming. This would suck, but at the same time other instances would be unaffected, meaning the Lemmy equivalents of like /r/news, /r/dankmemes, and /r/space could continue on. Furthermore, if the mods of those Instance A communities were aware of the possibility of the impending death of Instance A, they could form a migration plan ahead of time to another instance, and communicate this to the users ahead of time.
Compare that to where we are now, where literally every subreddit is shut down and needing to find an alternative place to land with practically no warning. I'd much prefer the federated scenario.
The first /r/place was seriously one of the coolest and most chaotic things to watch unfold in real-time!
Those three (and their variants, à la Kubuntu/Xubuntu) are all good - I probably wouldn't look at others unless you have a strong desire for something else.
Between this and Twitter, I feel like "enshittification" is really the word of the past year. It's incredible to watch these massive social networks completely turn on their users in the name of profit.
Also /r/justrolledintotheshop