The study talks to 16 Mastodon admins who got to say what they thought Mastodon did. It’s not really a study, it’s just a survey. Being posted here is just confirmation bias. For Mastodon to increase citizen empowerment, there has to be something measured and a control group that isn’t on Mastodon.

From the abstract

In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities

You really have to read beyond the headline. This isn’t Reddit.

And as long as you don’t need simple access to most features such as volumes. The podman implementation on not Linux leaves quite a bit to be desired for anyone trying to do more than just run a binary wrapped in a container. I’m not throwing shade because it’s FOSS and anything is better than Docker. Only Docker will work for a production-capable dev environment on not Linux unless podman’s development has exponentially increased in the last year since I tried to move a shop to podman on not Linux.

As long as you’re on Linux, podman is superior and will do all of the things you’re asking about. If you need to also support Windows or Mac, Docker is the only thing that will work (although people have told me Rancher isn’t bad now for a couple of years).

Walk me through this.

Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).

Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.

Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?

Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?