It's simple: if you have to pay "copyright holders" for anything you use your AI training on, there can be no AI training. They need to ingest all the data they can to become better and it would cost dozen of billions if you had to pay every single piece of content. So we have to pick between a future in which "copyright holders" fight to get their $ or a future where we can push AI to enter a new era

Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable

It's their own fault. They didn't have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn't have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.

They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.

I'm really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants

Data cap never made sense because ISPs pay for pipe size, not total of data. Someone using 20mbps 24/7 will use a lot more data but cause a lot less congestion than someone using 300mbps for 1hr at peak hour every day.

If their infra is undersized, they should at least not count data between midnight and 8am toward the data cap since the pipes are mostly sitting idles

I had so much time yet so few things to watch and play growing up, I think I've become a data hoarder as a "response" to this. Now I love being able to provide friends & family all the content they could ever want.

You can order a Canadian server with fairly low latency. I have one but I also have a couple of machines at home. I don't like buying used and I care about wattage so I usually get beelinks mini PC from Amazon. They often have deals where you can have good specs for <$150, including 128gb SSDs, 8 or 16gb of ram and a 4 cores 15w CPU

I use Ubuntu for everything (including at work, tens of thousands machines) and it's great

That's usually my fear with the fediverse. Whenever I step on mastodon.social, 2/3 of the front page is ultra left memes and talking point. I mostly want to talk tech and sport, not read about culture wars. It's been hard to escape the crazy politics, and so far lemmy.world seems to have a lot of communities focused on other topics which is very welcome