It reminds me of a story that a web developer who found out that other sites were hosting his game by linking back to his website in an iframe and using it to make money off of ads. He made a check that if any calls are being made to the game from an iframe, replace the game with an image of goatse.

https://www.pcgamer.com/websites-stole-and-monetized-a-free-browser-game-so-the-designer-replaced-it-with-goatse/

It’s not that they just found out, but more that they have combed through and prepared all of the information they could legally release.

Genuine question: If the network is decentralized, how are they able to determine the amount of users on the system?

The article mentions opt-in usage reporting, but that would only indicate there’s around 115 million users actively reporting that they’re using it, right?

Unfortunately this.

Not only would companies not want to use it because of no incentives like what they get from the internet with monetary gains, it’ll likely only exist as an incredibly niche thing because not many people will hear about it due to the first part.

That said, maybe that’s the best part of the whole thing. With less things to exploit, it wards off companies and “influencers” just using it to make money and it becomes more focused around hobbies like the internet once was.

Checking this out based on your recommendation and I already like it. Simple, no bullshit, and is similar to use to something like NewPipe but for desktops.

Agreed. And in a way, it is also a contributing factor to how polarizing internet-based discussion has become. Rather than show you the most cited websites for answering a political question, it’s going to use its profile of “you” to show you something you’re more likely to engage with.

You can absolutely start a community about rabbits. I don’t think that would count as “going off the deep end” at all. I think Reddit having its large, singular community for certain things ended up dissuading a lot of people from making communities based around things they enjoy.

The vibe I’ve been getting while here is that things are a lot more open. You can create a community that already exists, even with the same name, the only caveat being they cannot be located on the same instance. While I can see that possibly leading to a bit of fragmenting of some communities, It’ll let people create their own little pocket of the internet and have it exactly how they want it.

Either way, you should absolutely 100% make that community!

Exactly this. MECM even has this sort of feature built-in with Orchestration Groups. You can set group 1 to perform updates and reboot at a certain time, then group 2 will only begin its update/reboot cycle when group 1 has completed or crossed a certain threshold.