The counter argument to this is that the government's public communication should be accessible to everyone. Government messages should be visible to the public without them having to register and log in. That is becoming increasingly more difficult in corporate social media, especially Meta's - Instagram and FB are good indicators.
The advantage of the fediverse isn't just that you can view public messages without registering. If you need to subscribe to something, you can do so from any fediverse platform - no need for another new account. This leaves it open for the government to choose or even host their own fediverse platform - something many governments are already doing.
The internet in 2023 also brought us Mastodon, Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse (yes, they were there before. But the corporate social media finally managed to piss off enough users) and resurgence of IRC, Usenet, XMPP, etc, while services like matrix are going strong.
Yes - those are more exclusive and smaller in size. But they are viable (except perhaps the really old protocols). And we finally have something to look forward to. 2023 wasn't all that bad.
No mention of what the oil company is doing to address the leak and environmental damage. It's all coast guard or some other public institutions. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses, again!
If these oil companies had to pay for all the damages they did - including lead contamination and climate change supported by disinformation campaigns, these oil barons wouldn't have the money to afford a begging bowl. Sociopaths!
Firefox is probably the oldest browser in existence. The only surviving one among the original three (Netscape Navigator). The fact that it's still among the major two is impressive by itself.
Something that blew my mind recently was learning the fact that most of the muscles that move our palm and fingers are actually located in our forearm. Human anatomy is incredible! (I'm not a medical professional).
I really really want their bullshit to be defeated and freedom to prevail. What I described towards the end is partially my experience. But it's not a complete loss yet. I'm trying to get everyone off chrome, and more people seem to be listening this time.
Trust me when I say this - they will keep pushing until their services are no longer usable at all on anything other than chrome. And they will find enough money to keep the antitrust regulators quiet. Meanwhile a big chunk of those who switched away from chrome will return to it - because principles are not bigger than convenience. Meanwhile, those with enough constitution to stay put will find themselves excluded from a large part of the web - a digital pariah, if you will.
Everything you said is correct. But the infuriating part is that YouTube reached that position by killing off its competition. YouTube wouldn't be the only one standing now if they had shown the same behavior 10 years ago. Even more infuriating is that there are a lot of people around who support this entitlement from Google - because you know, you're stealing from the creators! All creators should find a way to accept donations without feeding the abusive corporation.
Email hosting is hard for two reasons. The first is that there are too many parts to configure - MTA, MDA, DKIM, RDNS, spam filter, webmail, etc. The viable solution is to use a turnkey solution like mailinabox, mailcow or mailu.
The second problem is deliverability. At the minimum, you will have to 'warm up' the server. You will have to send a few dozen mails to others and ask them to mark as not-spam. Even then, a lot of other factors come into play - like the IP address block (for example, mails from AWS always gets blocked), domain name and even the top-level domain - they all influence the spam filter score.
Meanwhile, deliverability with Google and Microsoft (incl google workspace and ms 365) are lost causes. Google sends your mail to the spam folder irrespective of your spamassasin score. They provide no viable solution to this. MS on the other hand just drops mail silently. This isn't a bug. Both of them are trying to destroy the federated nature of email and consolidate all email business to themselves.
Meanwhile, the big players like fastmail and migadu get better treatment. Especially, migadu is a good choice if you want unlimited aliases.
Finally, talking about aliases. Most services (except migadu) offer only a few aliases. That limitation is not there for selfhosted email. An alternative to aliases is to use + addresses (eg: mybox+bank@mydomain.com). The advantage of this method is that you can make up multiple addresses on the fly (without registering) using a single alias/address. You can use this in combination with a filter like sieve (server-side) or notmuch (client-side) to sort and filter incoming mail.
People's belief in what's on the internet (conspiracy theories) naturally implies their distrust in the NHS' words, since both are contradictory. I still believe that mistrust is a major driver here.
However, you're right that the internet may be swaying public opinion of those who are indecisive. The rise of the internet may be partially responsible for the rise of mistrust and antivax sentiments.
I'm not going to completely disagree with you, since the answer isn't so black and white. You are arguing that people are turning antivax due to loss of generational knowledge of these diseases (which you are equating to stupidity). There is probably some element of truth in it.
But we also have examples to the contrary. The covid pandemic and its vaccine are certainly a product of our generation. Yet, we have people outright denying the seriousness of the disease (it's just a flu!) and completely neglecting the massive loss of lives. That is not due to generational forgetfulness, but clearly due to mistrust.
I can't be sure, but I feel that the latter (mistrust) is a more significant cause of antivax sentiments than the former (loss of memory).
The counter argument to this is that the government's public communication should be accessible to everyone. Government messages should be visible to the public without them having to register and log in. That is becoming increasingly more difficult in corporate social media, especially Meta's - Instagram and FB are good indicators.
The advantage of the fediverse isn't just that you can view public messages without registering. If you need to subscribe to something, you can do so from any fediverse platform - no need for another new account. This leaves it open for the government to choose or even host their own fediverse platform - something many governments are already doing.