DeepPhilosopher

Here's a video explaining the development process: https://youtu.be/jlbcKuDEBw8?si=EiepVVbA0Mo4u9nF

He was poached and works at Meta now.

Sure, average people don't care about federation, but what about the techies at sites like Technology Review and The Verge who write these kinds of articles? They love to point out Bluesky's (yet to be seen in action) federation thanks to the AT Protocol, so you know they see the value in federation that the average person doesn't, but these reporters choose Bluesky, a platform with all the same warning signs as Twitter that barely has federation, something they purport to value despite the fact that ActivityPub and Mastodon exist and are much more developed and open?

Agreed. I don't understand why so many are choosing to rally around Bluesky and its AT Protocol, which is promising federation but has yet to deliver. Not to mention it is backed by a for-profit company that has all the incentive to enshittify much like Facebook and Twitter have.

Compare this to Mastodon (which unlike Bluesky) is just one service in a sea of many others using ActivityPub (Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc) which overall makes for a much more vibrant and promising platform.

And unlike Bluesky, Mastodon has put federation into action; as an anecdote, even for posts with lots of replies, I've rarely seen more than two people from the same server comment on a given post. The diversity is astounding. Mastodon is already everything everyone wants from Bluesky in this regard.

To me, it just looks like everyone is getting set up again to shoot themselves in the foot much like what happened with Twitter, and I don't understand why? Is it because choosing a server is to hard or stressful?

Seconded

Whether or not its paywalled depends on how much you read. You can get around most of the paywalls by going incognito or clearing your cookies.

what is wrong with some people?

Way for Goldman Sachs to say the quiet part out loud. Not curing people so you can sell them something that merely deals with the problem's effects. This shouldn't even be up for discussion.

Seems like one company is selling the cure to a problem another company (companies) caused. Not to be all "capitalism bad" but I thought promise of the Invisible Hand of the Market was that it was supposed to make life better by directly solving everyone's problems. Instead, it seems to be creating more and (as Goldman Sachs admitted) not even trying solving those.

The fact that MS is doing this could be a sign that most people just don't find much utility in these AI tools.

Like you said, they're trying to get people hooked.

But if AI isn't any useful to people in the first place, this goes nowhere and they're still stuck with a low/decreasing amount of users.

"Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?" Yes. It's called Lemmy. https://join-lemmy.org Just found out about it today.