They aren't stupid to abandon the brand and community just like that and start from nothing. The team plans to start a nonprofit that will work alongside and not under the current Manjaro company. They do say that if Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG declines, or the feel that they are dragging their heels (which they have done) they will start a strike. They are doing this rn. If that fails then they will just move to the next stage which is to leave and/or fork the project.
I think they know that they have a shitty product that nobody asked and everybody hates, but they also know that corporations and institutions have their workflows and custom software stacks built on top of windows and therefore them and their workers are not very easily going to jump ship. Only thing they need to make sure of that they don't break 40 years of backwards compatibility. Understanding that, why the fuck not just milk people? If it backfires, then it backfires, but even then Microsoft makes more money on Office 365 alone than they do from Windows.
X has 600 million users, Mastodon 9-10 million. Even if you assume 2/3 of Xitter are bots, that's still 20x difference in reach. You should know that you and I are not "normal" for using Mastodon. A group of randomly picked people 9/10 will know of X/twitter, maybe 3/10 have heard of Mastodon.
I hope they don't phase X out, because that would be a social media suicide. Orgs, public personas and projects are not average users and can't really care about personal preference or user experience, they only need to care where people are. They are there to get social media reach and just jumping out of Xitter would harm their social media presence and the project.
Who do you think owns Ukrainian government at this point? They funded their own twilight by selling government property, land, resource rights and legislative favors to multinationals. Zelensky et. al knows who brought them to power and has kept them there.
the real misdirection is focusing on individuals and their blame. The real question is why does UK political system produces these people rule and how do they keep ruling.
The real issue is that most social media is for-profit addiction machine breeding more and more anti-social behavior, not that kids have access to it. This is just a another example that liberals are incapable of seeing any ill in rampant capitalism or much less intervene in it's mechanism for the common good. Everything is framed around profit seeking bringing out the greatest good and individuals choice. They are very at a loss when having to to do any systemic analysis why social-media has ill effects on social fabric. The best they can come up is that kids are not yet fully formed adults able to do the right choice, so they must be guided.
They mostly do that because they want control and maybe slowly reach their tentacles into projects. Like Chromium and Android are in theory open source, but in practice both are locked down by google and used for their business and mass data harvesting and advertising empire.
GDP doesn't mean or measure anything concrete. Especially the nominal GDP. Your economy might be just banking services and for average person has really tough times making ends meet thanks to massive cost of living problem, but hey all it makes few people very wealthy and the big number go up in terms of USD. You can't even fight a war because all manufacturing got outsourced because local labor is unaffordable and the military is dependent on existing stockpiles and there is no idle manufacturing capacity to ramp up in case of emergencies so you don't even have power projection or "bigger stick".
Then some middle income country with healthy manufacturing base, natural resources, growing middle class, own army with it's own arms supply chain for the basics, but it ranks bellow you in GDP.
They aren't stupid to abandon the brand and community just like that and start from nothing. The team plans to start a nonprofit that will work alongside and not under the current Manjaro company. They do say that if Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG declines, or the feel that they are dragging their heels (which they have done) they will start a strike. They are doing this rn. If that fails then they will just move to the next stage which is to leave and/or fork the project.