Haha I think they might be talking of how Mastodon doesn’t insert ads or bought posts right next to your own posts, so a professional institution like a parliament no longer risks having erection pills or a crypto ad that fakes association with a celebrity next to a post by a political party leader.

The EU itself also has a Mastodon instance with the funny, overly clear name of https://social.network.europa.eu/

But only the institutions of EU, not for EU residents.

I like this idea because it becomes very easy to verify authenticity especially now that verification badges on X is just subscription badges without verification. You simply set up a subdomain of the form social.country.tld (much like the German parliament did) and you’ll know [email protected] is an authentic representative for a political party or whatever. No money involved other than running the instance, which will be a tiny cost for something as niche as one offering a voice for the parliament alone.

So I hope this takes off even more around the world. It is certainly a more democratic way to do social than paying some dude in America that runs his personal garden to have badges.

There are trade unions in the USA but the cultural difference compared to in a Scandinavian country is very striking, both in terms of American vs Scandinavians unions themselves but also their support. It would surprise many Scandinavians to learn that many Americans don’t even want trade unions because it’s for example commonly seen as that they interfere with career paths, promoting seniority at the cost of new blood or keep the wages low because individual wages can be affected.

I think the culture collision here is that the whole idea behind unions in Scandinavia is to offer a stronger collective voice and bargaining actor to increase wages and other subjects that improves the standards and quality of life / motivation of their employees so that the relationship between the work place and the individual is less asymmetrical.

But it’s been a long journey and it still is even if unionizing in USA has seen an uptick in debates lately, because USA has a radical and capitalistic history where there are loud and influential voices that even asking for basic rights on a job can be seen as “greed” and the company looks for someone being less of a bother and not asking these questions instead. All due to weak unions, of course. Otherwise the company would of course lose too much in employee skills by excluding everyone having these demands (and already being union members) like the situation here in Scandinavia where this by consequence is simply not an option.

This is at least my two cents of this entire situation from the “outside” also in Europe, please correct me if I’m wrong…

I know it’s supposed to make them sound good and might indeed be meant for leaking, but all I can think of is the demands on quality assurance and risks of failures down the road if such precision is paramount for the operation of the vehicle and assumed by the teams building it.

So give me a less finicky vehicle, please, and leave that precision for devices not subject to highly varying road conditions at very high speeds and housing people.

The main feature is that you’ll never have problem with too few or no seeders again, and everything will be fast always, and no one will ask or expect you to seed. Some have retention period on the content for like a decade.

Exactly, and there’s honestly no need for them to have 100,000+ people in them either. 1,000 people goes a long way too. There’s a point of critical mass when you can have sustained discussions and there are enough upvotes to form a sensible feed by popularity in the community, and that critical mass isn’t that huge IMHO. There also often comes a moment when greater popularity is detrimental and worsens it.

I could also jump onto Lemmy almost right away as my most loved communities were already forming here. I think Lemmy has a better outlook than Mastodon in this regard because the community is waiting for you, rather than Mastodon is expecting you to form your circle, which can take a lot of effort in the midst of fediverse confusion.