The iPhone was the first smartphone that hot insanely popular. It launched the app store model that’s now used on every mobile platform including Android. Those apps have gotten hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in India and China who are doing e-commerce and opening small businesses from their phones. That’s food on the table for the working class. They can earn money while looking after their children because they’re not chained to a desktop computer for internet access. People in remote areas can know instantly about natural disasters and the news, educating them and making them active citizens in a democracy.

People across the world can chat with each other for nearly free using messaging and social media apps, and won’t have to send letters or pay extra fees for long-distance calls. The iPhone got more people onto what formerly only Blackberry-owning business executive had.

It’s such a first world thing to belittle the impact of smartphone (an industry which the iPhone shaped tremendously), when it has so much tangible impact, especially to working people.

I think many CEOs are the peaked-in-high-school types but the business environment has kept them in check, until now. Now with MAGA unleashed, they feel free to show off their idiocy.

See, this falls apart when there’s another instance that focuses on solarpunk. When some communities on that instance become more popular and active than the communities in your local instance, you’d want to be subscribed to the solar punk communities on that new instance too. Now, your local feed is only showing you solarpunk communities hosted on slrpnk.net but not solarpunk communities on other instances. This distinction is not meaningful because where a community is hosted can be totally detached from the content. The users you know by handle can also be very active, if not more active, on other instances talking about solarpunk than slrpnk.net.

Unique interests can be already be self-curated by subscribing to certain communities. All apps have the subscribed feed. There’s no need for communities of a certain type to be on one instance.

Edit: typo

Why did the UK refuse?

I don’t like the normalizing of using “woke” to describe progressives.

The article doesn’t say it’s happening. This is from another source:

Mao Xiangdong, vice-president of the Shanghai Institute of Technology and a member of the standing committee of the municipal people’s congress, proposed the idea during Shanghai’s ongoing legislative sessions, according to a post by China Development News, a newspaper under the National Development and Reform Commission.

It is not clear when the post was put online but it was removed on Friday morning

Source: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3295169/unplug-great-firewall-boost-chinas-competitiveness-shanghai-lawmaker-says

CNN++?

Why would China want to sell the lucrative secret TikTok algorithm to the US government?

Oh, how thoughtful.