The search function is nice and really appreciated. But, from my experience, the biggest problem with Mastodon is how much work you have to put into curating a feed, something traditional social media has done some of the work for you. I mean it's fairly simple once you get the hang of it, but a lot of people are used to having their hand held.
Also, I'm not looking to piss people off, but I think in terms of the users on the platform it is extremely progressive, and non-progressive people will be less likely to engage with that.
Or will change that. I suspect in their infancy most of the popular corporate owned social media platforms probably had a more left leaning clientele to begin with.
Colonizing mars is a stupid thing to do pretty much full stop.
Mars cannot be terraformed. It has no meaningful magnetic field. That's a dead end for a planet's ability to retain a useful atmosphere and ward off cosmic radiation. You'll have to live in shielded, sealed pods to survive there, always. In which case you may as well be in space with access to abundant solar energy and less of a gravity well to contend with for your frequent resupply missions. There's barely any advantage to being on Mars compared to orbiting some random Lagrange point or the sun itself. I guess you can make use of some earthworks for civil engineering? Hardly seems worth it.
There’s also no point in colonizing mars. We have enough uninhabitated desert here on earth. It’s not a space problem, it’s a cost problem. And building on mars is a lot more costly than building in a desert.
I've read that Mars could retain an Earth-like atmosphere because, while it's stripped away by the solar wind, it would happen over tens of millions of years; any remotely plausible terraforming attempt would be able to replenish it much faster than that.
Mastodon is a lot harder to enshittify being as it's decentralised and uses an open protocol.
If it looks like an instance has gone down the path of corporate enshittification, other instances will stop federating with it.
The software itself could be a target, but it's open-source. Even the original instance created by the software creators (mastodon.social), turns to the dark side, someone will inevitably fork the last open-source version of the software and other instances will then update from the most popular fork.
As long as the underlying protocol remains the same, it doesn't really matter what happens.
Heck, kbin is totally different software but uses the same protocol to federate with the various Lemmys, other kbins, and, yes, Mastodon instances too.
Consider what happened a number of times with Reddit where various groups left and used the last open-source version of the software to set up their own Reddit clones. It wasn't particularly successful for them, but one or two of them are still out there.
If there had been a large number of them all sharing content and posts like Mastodon etc., maybe they would have been more popular. (For better or worse).
The big addition in this edition is a rebuilt search facility. That matters, because it’s something users expect to just work. Mastodon 4.2 has therefore made it possible to search for users using by words in their bio and their names. “The most exciting news is that for the first time, you can now search for posts,” Rochko wrote
That’s the main point of the article. Damn, when did clickbait become so ubiquitous?
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