It's yet another way, but not the only way. We have for a long time seen things like Silvercloud - which is the cheaper version of a talking therapy where the patient mostly keeps a structured diary and one qualified therapist is required to review many more patients compared to a real-time conversation therapy model.

If it can be set to private then it can be set to public again. I don't use any of those platforms but I would always assume that all my usage might end up being published one day.

Rug-pulling years of built up blue checkmark brand/trust just to sell $7 subscriptions shows how little they care about anything.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon decides “nvm likes are public again” with zero consideration.

> blue checkmark brand/trust

Blue checkmark had no value then, has no value now.

Before it was just a "good boy" badge. It just meant that whoever distributed that thing liked you enough.

This sounds like I need to host my PDS. Easy for me with no public profile but if I was someone famous wouldn't that mean I needed enterprise class hosting?

You don't need to host your own PDS for any of this to work. It works the same way regardless of who hosts your PDS.

I think what may be confusing you is that Bluesky (the company) acts in two different roles. There's hosting (PDS) and there's an app (bsky.app). You can think of these conceptually as two different services or companies.

Yes, when you sign up on Bluesky, you do get "Bluesky hosting" (PDS). But hosting doesn't know anything about apps. It's more like a Git repo under the hood.

Different apps (Bluesky app is one of them) can then aggregate data from your hosting (wherever it is) and show different projections of it.

Finally, no, if you're famous, you don't need enterprise hosting. Hosting a PDS can be extremely cheap (like $1/mo maybe)? PDS doesn't get traffic spikes on viral content because it's amortized by the app (which serves from its DB).

The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.

I can see the irb giving retroactive approval solely because of political pressure. Which is why legitimate studies seek approval in advance.

Well those materials are verifiable at least.

My favorite are "titanium" products which are just electroplated with a layer of titanium a few atoms thick.

Refund-without-return is what might fade out. I've had that with low value things like a lightbulb that had the wrong fitting.

This is a somewhat useful filter for actual consumers but here we are also looking at large scale fraud. The article mentions opponents using rotating IP addresses and high volumes of refund requests to try to overwhelm counter-fraud measures.

How would you describe the arrival of people from Europe and elsewhere into what is now California?

I meant extraction of resources by Europeans for 200 years. C

This suprises me because at the time user interfaces were optimised for keyboard - the only input device most people had. Also screen resolutions were lower so there were fewer things you could click on anyway.