I live in the #PNW where life is typically harder. It is a bit harder to dwell here in western Oregon because there is pretty much an absence of jobs in the tech field. We have a local university and there is a Hewlett-Packard in the city. But the minimum requirement for getting into that is a four-year degree. I didn't do that for a few reasons in my twenties. I'm stuck with the consequences of that decision.

I don't want to get into economic motivators with you. Primarily: 1) I don't know you. 2) I have had a few disagreements with socialists in the past over what is reality vs. what are the actual economic encumbrances which a majority of people will acknowledge and also work with.

The problem is greater than 50% of the country does not care at all about open standards in computing or the fact one's computer will sometimes spy on them -- in so many words. They will use anything tech-constructed that is spoon fed to them by the crazy "bald head" executives such as Satya Nadella and ex-CEO Steve Ballmer over at Microsoft.

For the intelligent people, we've had years to switch over our infrastructure and communications to Open Source. Not only have we encountered maximum resistance from within (with me it's been a big issue w/ all the male prima donnas and borderline isolationists who insist on doing every tech-related task themselves) but apart from that, the regulation in the US government has been sorely lacking.

That is why around 58% of the American population voted for the melon felon (Trump). They want someone to more or less "burn the whole system down." And Trump will try his best to do this, too -- but even he faces the same constraints AND allowances as the rest of us plebs.

The remainder of the world must really be disliking the USA right now. Here we are, almost on the forefront of some really good, permanent change -- and now once again we are all collectively held back by the idiots in charge who don't care and still indirectly control a lot of the money inflows, unfortunately.

I'm personally going to be hunkered down and learning tech knowledge in my spare time to circumvent some of the seemingly insurmountable problems facing modern technology and people. It's really all I can do. Industry, especially Silicon Valley at this moment in time, is not embracing the change which we need on social terms -- or more specifically OUR terms as true contributors.

It's up to the volunteers of America, once again, kind of like it was to some extent for activists during the sixties, to herald in some kind of positive change.

I have no idea where politics is going. Many of them are ambivalent about making Open Source more prevalent in America. At least in Germany they've tried to adopt it internally within their government. That has not happened domestically in the US. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Microsoft has a monopoly in government and business. This pesky fact must change someday without "burning it all down." Our freedom depends on loosening up the shackles of oppression brought on by Microsoft, Oracle, and the tightwad bastards on Wall Street.

Poor people are suffering. People such as me are aloof and withdrawn because we have been cast to the side of the fringes within society by much of society itself, by our crazy parents if we had them, or by bad circumstances. Please, before you judge me do know that I really know that poor people are suffering. That is my primary concern in these times.

Sadly, there are usually good reasons why more people don't use the things you suggest.

If anyone on the web wants to link to your Bluesky content, they have to use the 'app.bsky' domain. The operators of that domain can refuse to serve content posted by you, and basically hold your 'decen' identity hostage much like Substack or X could.

Web sites will not risk linking to non- 'bsky.app' domains because that will send Bluesky users to servers that won't recognize their auth cookies, resulting in a broken UX (much like Mastodon's).

Email defined a URL protocol prefix to prevent this type of confusion, but today's techie elitists would rather tell users to roll up their sleeves and "learn Linux" (a thing that has zero identifiable features to a non-techie because the only common part is a kernel). "Just pick one" doesn't work because the same people will be peppering them incessantly about the need to distro-hop for various reasons (and nearly all the howto resources are written for the CLI, which looks frightening to most). The common thread here is techie culture doesn't standardize the UI bits that most people need as common points of reference. Instead, the culture will give users the choice of becoming techies themselves or using something like Signal – a would-be defacto standard that is most definitely centralized.

The annoying nerds need to be told why they fail, and frankly I don't care if they're annoyed by it. If you spent literal decades not being able to give this stuff away for free, then please take a step back and ask what is missing.