And there you have the reason they sued to force Musk to stick to his word of buying it rather than let him off the hook and look for someone else dumb enough to pay that much for it.

Revenue is money in before costs, so yes their revenue is still positive given they are actually charging some people positive amounts. Their earnings are quite likely negative.

It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven’t quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.

Just a few years back, Vernor Vinge’s scifi novels still seemed reasonably futuristic in dealing with the issue of fakes well by including several bits where the resolution of imagery was a factor in being able to analyze with sufficient certainty that you were talking to the right person, and now that notion already seems dated, and certainly not enough for a setting far into the future.

(at least they don’t still seem as dated as Johnny Mnemonic’s plot of erasing a chunk of your memories to transport an amount of data that would be easier and less painful to fit in your head by stuffing a microsd card up your nose)

It’s stupid that it’s not there, though, and I suspect it will get fixed at some point. Basically, some concerns were raised about people using it to doctor timelines (but they can already do that by setting up a single-person instance and messing with the database), and the new instance can validate the signatures of the posts anyway, so they’re no less secure than posts from other accounts received via federation. If anyone is really concerned they could slap an “imported from …” banner on old/migrated posts so people are aware they were not originally posted there.

Sadly, while you can export everything, you can’t import posts in Mastodon without having direct access to the database and poking about.

You can import following lists, bookmarks, blocks and mutes, though.