How do you do that?

King Charles III isn’t my king either. Still a king though. And doing a much better job than King Charles I

By “West Papua” do they mean the town at the extreme west end of the island or the entire western half of New Guinea?

if the shop is 10 km away vs 30 km away

It’s nothing at all like that. The moon is 384 megameters away. Mars is 54000 to 150000 megameters away, depending on orbits.

So it would be like 384 meters vs 54-150 kilometers.

Escaping the gravity well on the moon is also much cheaper.

[In terms of infrastructure and accessibility, it’s really no contest. The Moon is closer, always has a view of Earth, can exchange signals and deliverables hundreds of times more quickly than can be exchanged between Earth and Mars, and is easier to land on and take off from. Certain infrastructure could be easily shared between the Earth and the Moon, such as the internet, whereas Mars would likely, due to its remote nature, need its own standalone infrastructure.]

But they are both far enough away that is doesn’t really matter.

The difference is huge. The moon is practically right next door to us (384 megameters). Mars closest point to Earth is 54000 megameters.

It’s like having a friend living 384 meters down the road vs living 54-150 kilometers away.

500,000 mph is 800,000 kilometers/hour or 800 megameters/hour. So it could reach the moon (384 megameters) in under 30 minutes. It could reach Mars in 68 hours or less than 3 days when Mars is closest to Earth (54600 megameters).

The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile

I really don’t. I just post what I want without thinking about anything being “worthwhile” or needing “confidence”.

Anybody can do that. Doesn’t have to be a mod.

An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn’t desirable to post to

Who cares who the mod is? If you want to post than post. I never think about whether it is “desirable” to post somewhere.

“well I just deleted my 15+ year account with quintillion karma.”

Your account only had a quintillion karma? My account had a sextillion karma.

So the killer functionality this article is touting is:

Yes. The killer functionality is that Threads finally is a real Twitter competitor like people have been claiming. But I think that is a good thing, because I want to see Musk looking like a dumbass blowing $44 billion when Twitter goes bankrupt.

Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor.

It is purely a matter of free public servers. Right now, the free public servers are almost all Fedverse. But they could just as easily be Usenet servers. If the free Fedverse servers close like free Usenet servers did, then Fedverse will also decline. But Usenet actually has some superior features that Fedverse lacks (e.g. automatic merging of groups), so if free Usenet servers pop back up, it would take off again.

I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.

It is a lot like Usenet, but Usenet has some superior features.

1. Discussion groups are automatically merged across all servers. So it is decentralized but does not feel decentralized.

2. Newreaders only show you content that you have not already read/seen

3. Readers let you kill articles in subscribed newsgroups and threads within subscribed newsgroup articles so that you don’t see them in the future.

[reader.usenet.monster/group?group=comp.lang.php]

This is awesome. Thanks!

Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.

This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn’t matter at all like a Fedverse server does.

The only reason people don’t use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.

deleted by creator

Isn’t that how it is supposed to work? Microblogs shouldn’t get mixed in with Threads right?

people didn’t want to express a different opinion than what the ‘masses’ have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma

Critical difference. Reddit had groupthink literally enforced by the software. If you had negative karma in a subreddit and you tried to post, it would say “You are doing that too much, please wait 8 minutes to post again”, even if your last post was 2 weeks ago.

These growth rates for reddit alternatives are insane. I love it.