today, more users just means more cost

Not if they’re setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can’t.

The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit

Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.

Given that I’ve also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what’s needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.

Labour governing alone have been weak tea. We all want a change of government. I’m just hoping enough of the people who want wealth taxes, guaranteed minimum income, and properly funded public services, turn up to vote in sufficient numbers to get the change of government we actually need. Rather than the one that wants to drag the country back to the late 1980s/ early 1990s, like the past few decades never happened…

I thought the universities were still government owned?

This is a really good question. My understanding is they are self-owning (thus “autonomous”), but because they are incorporated using a special legal structure just for them - rather than being incorporated as a company or trust - this gives them special status as a “Crown entity”. It’s vaguely analogous to the special legal structure that iwi use to incorporate, for purposes of receiving and managing assets received as Treaty of Waitangi settlements. The iwi aren’t state-owned, but in a sense they are a special sort of “Crown entity”. I’m not an expert of any of this stuff, just a longtime observer, so I’d love to be corrected by someone who is.