The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.

This is not the case in places outside the US.

To all the men saying they’re comfortable enough in jeans / chinos / whatever… you should TRY wearing a dress in a hot summer. There is a little bit of adjusting to get used to it, but after that damn they feel amazing. Women are so lucky to wear these whenever they want to.

You can of course decide you’re comfortable enough in whatever, but an informed decision is always the better thing.

Not sure elon could afford the cloud bills if mrbeast actually did that

It is very easy to argue that network convergence is NOT a good thing. That’s the whole point of the “embrace, extended, destroy” point you responded to.

Honestly, after literally over 30 years on the internet, I can safely say that this idea of bringing everyone together into one space, that will make both the space and the people better, does not work. Even back in the 90s it affected the signal to noise ratio badly. Now there are significant sets of bad actors, shitposting/meta and general noisy ignorance and hate that can easily, easily drown out any decent signal. It’s like a permanent Eternal September.

Think of this like the subject of tolerance - typically criticised that as a philosophy, in that it would thus tolerate the very things that would undermine and destroy it. Rather, it is not a philosophy, but a social contract - if you don’t use tolerance yourself, others are not bound to be tolerant of you. Of course, I’m not talking about being tolerant/intolerant here, but using the quality of engagement and participation in a community, as a barometer for whether that user should be engaged in that community.

Some barriers to entry are self-selection for appropriate users, and therefore a good thing - whether through obscurity, level of engagement, education or whatever. Without these, everything gets overrun and crushed. We haven’t yet found a good self-moderating system for online communities that provides everyone with a positive and fulfilling experience.

Threads can be Threads. The fediverse can be the fediverse. No-one is forced to choose just one, and trying to force them together is going to crush the fediverse. Lemmy has about 20,000 active users. Threads got 30 million signups in 24 hours.