blind3rdeye

That does sound pretty bad. I guess it really highlights the power of a monopoly. Businesses may rely on each other, but if one relies more, then they pay all costs due to necessity while the other pays nothing because they can easily outlast the pain.

Unless I've misunderstood the law, it doesn't hurt small engines, because small search engines don't have to pay.

I've never see anyone respond with hostility to any 'how to' question on mastodon. What you've described sounds totally unlike anything I've seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I'd be interested in seeing how that happened.

joinmastodon.org (the 'official' way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So... I guess that's not a barrier after all.

Sure, but not in this context.

No quantity of counter-content can overcome the person who controls what posts are actually seen by other users. Staying on X can never lead to any kind of balance. Staying there only serves to prop-up the false sense of legitimacy.

[edit] I'd posted something to go into more detail. But I've decided that branch of conversation is not really the way forward.

I'll just say that the software is not installed by choice, and it does things that people don't want it to do... so it could be described as malware. But if you want it on your computer, then I guess for you it is not malware. In any case, it doesn't look like we're going to agree about this regardless.

Anti-cheat software is very clearly and explicitly spyware. That's the entire purpose of it. It spies on how you use your software in the hope that if you cheat you'll be seen by the spyware watching you.

This spyware is generally not something people want on their computer - as evidenced by people complaining about it. So effectively whats happening is that people are being spied on against their wishes. Spyware is a common category of malware.

So I think it's pretty easy to see why people might describe anti-cheat software as malware.

Chrome is already spyware on its own. That's basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

That could force a change in the DNC, but the change would be to push them further to the right. The issue is that the right-wing party won the election. They got more than 50% of the total votes. So the democrats aren't going to see splitting their own base as a viable pathway to victory. If a left-wing faction splitters off, then the DNC will be forced to try to capture more votes on the other side instead.

If the democrats won the election then we'd be in a situation where we can talk about pushing them further left. But when they lose, that's not really an option. (Most of these strategy problems disappear with ranked choice voting... but I doubt the current government has any interest in pushing for that kind of change!)

X's supreme dictator openly campaigns for Trump. He even promised to pay millions of dollars to help people vote for Trump. So yeah, I reckon that probably had an effect.