Remind me, who owns WhatsApp?

It may sound a little silly but when I get good feedback on something, I pop it in my journal under a specific tag so I can revisit it from time to time.

It’s unfortunate that people are unfair to you, possibly they are younger or otherwise have incorrect expectations about your fallibility as a human.

I used to respond to things like that but these days I let the positive comments speak for themselves. Just remember to ask for feedback- a lot of people otherwise won’t do it unless they’ve got something negative to say.

I have been thinking about this idea for some time also but a couple of things have always bugged me-

Firstly, how does this interact with privacy? For vote delegation to work, I think the votes would have to be public, or you can’t make a decision on who to delegate your vote to- someone could claim to have one set of views but vote contrary to that. People could come under pressure to vote one way or another.

Also, who crafts the legislation that is voted on? How do you prevent bill rolling (two unrelated ideas are boiled down to a single binary choice) and splitting (a new service is voted through but the taxes to fund it are not)?

You said local government at least so a national or state government could help craft these things, but what if the proposed legislation doesn’t actually hurt local people, but doesn’t take into account the actual problems they have locally? For example, what if it would help to allow building in a particular area, but the state government doesn’t know that and it never becomes a priority?

I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?

Because people are happy with that garden and don’t think about others. Please remember that your average internet user doesn’t really know what an API is, or understand about open standards, they just want to find some content that matches their interests, upvote and share said content with their friends who are also inside that garden.

This average user isn’t a bad person, stupid or naiive, they just have other things going on in their lives and the internet is a small part of it. They use it, take what they want from it and move on, and there are so many more of those people than you.

People who switch from iOS to Android report losing friends who were on iMessage and are unwilling to move to something platform agnostic such as Signal or WhatsApp. I wouldn’t underestimate the walled garden effect.

As a migrant from Digg to Reddit back in the paleolithic era, I would have said the same of Reddit, the UI really wasn’t good compared to Digg. People got used to it in time.

I also remember a time when it wasn’t clear if people would want to shop online, and a debate about whether email could really replace letters, or if people would find it too complicated.

People will come to the fediverse if we give them a reason to.

How does that differ to Twitter or Reddit?