Pokémon taught children everywhere that if they enter strangers’ houses without warning, the strangers might randomly give them useful objects that help them in life.

I intentionally didn’t register on big instances like lemmy.world or mastodon.social in order to avoid being part of obvious places to censor.

Ideally, the fediverse will help people in censorious countries access information their governments don’t want them to see, but I am not too optimistic, I used to think that about the entire Internet and look where we are now, governments around the world are very much managing to control the spread of information on it.

Yes. But we have all gotten pretty used to things on the Internet not costing money. If they start costing money, many people will either not want to or be able to use them.

Freely licensed works will be preserved a lot better because there will be more copies of them.

Likewise the fediverse is a step in that direction: this message will be federated to hundreds of servers so is more likely to survive longer than if I posted it to reddit.

When public transportation was first introduced in most places, it was run by private companies for profit. This changed mostly because it wasn’t profitable to compete with cars when those became popular.

Of course there still are private companies running public transport: long distance buses and trains in many places, and commercial aviation is really also a form of public transportation.

So there is nothing novel about buses being run by private companies for profit.

It still gives better results than DDG for many queries.