Democratic socialism is still socialism (It’s a bit broad to explain what it exactly means as it can range from wanting to achieve socialism through elections to not considering capitalist democracy as democracy and wanting to revolutionize into an actual democracy). That’s not the thing Nordic countries have. Nordic countries have social democracy, which is a form of capitalism where the government puts emphasis on social programs.

Social democracy can look great, because you can end up with a welfare state like the nordic countries did. But it’s not really trying to get rid of capitalism, it only tries to alleviate the problems capitalism causes.

What propaganda targeted was British exceptionalism and that exceptionalism is ultimately what drove the Brexit movement. Do you think that has disappeared from Britain with the older voters? I wouldn’t say so. Whenever there are online discussions about UK rejoining the EU there are brits who don’t want to join as a “regular” member. They want to rejoin with some of the benefits they had before Brexit, they want special treatment. To me that says that British exceptionalism is still very much alive and kicking.

There is a simple way to solve the mess, it’s rejoining the EU. But Britain doesn’t want that so I think the “well, you voted for this, get fucked by your own greedy elites” (to put it in your words) still applies.

It would let users choose the option that best describes the reason for their voting. You then do a bit of trickery where you don’t tell the user those votes don’t count and ignore all votes with that reason. That would allow removing useless downvotes.

But this being FOSS it would have to be a public secret so the irresponsible downvoters wouldn’t know about it.

You forgot the best part. Before doing that he was (and probably still is) against medicating yourself out of addictions because it’s the “easy way out”. His entire shtick is about the right way of living and then he acts contrarily to his own teachings.

You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who already has a general understanding of fediverse. If Jeri Ryan joins an instance, which instance do you his followers will join? Most likely the same instance, because they’re here to follow Jeri and they don’t know what instance to choose so they choose the most familiar one, the one Jeri is on. New users will congregate on instances that have people they want to follow and the followees most likely join whichever instance is the biggest or has someone they want to follow (because it’s not like they know any better how to pick an instance), which means people will centralize on either one or a handful of instances.

You can even see this happening in with Lemmy. Most people don’t know which instance to pick so they picked the biggest one, lemmy.world.

I think it’s not that Mastodon couldn’t do it, it’s that it will end up just being an essentially centralized instance as people will want to be in the same instance as the people/companies they want to follow. How users would want to use Mastodon is counter-intuitive to how the fediverse should work. Lemmy is focused on content (posts and comments) which means there’s less somebody to follow and the focus is on the communities.