Yes, anyone can write a book! If you have an idea, write it!

If your only goal is to finish a book, check out https://nanowrimo.org/ for inspiration and support just for to force yourself to write and keep writing!

If you want to publish it, self-publishing is surprisingly cheap, if you’re happy if you only sell a few hundred copies, many just to friends and family.

If you want to publish a real novel that appears in bookstores and gets featured and advertised, you need to submit it to publishers…and be prepared for LOTS of rejection. Some of the BEST novelists I know write 10 books for every 1 they get published. Now imagine the worst writers!

My prediction: verified video will start to become a thing.

Phones will be able to encode a digital signature with a video that certifies the date, time, and location where the video was captured. Modifying the video in any way will invalidate it.

Same for photos.

People will stop believing photos and video that don’t have a verifiable signature. Social networks and news organizations will automatically verify the signatures of all photos and videos they display.

Technically this is already possible today, it just needs to become mainstream and the default.

Lemmy is more like Reddit, Mastodon is more like Twitter.

In other words: Lemmy has communities (subreddits) and hierarchical comments for each post. Mastodon doesn’t have either of those things, but it has following users and following hashtags.

Despite being different, they have some interoperability because they use the same federation protocol.

I like allrecipes because it has lots of variations for the same recipe and reviews for each one.

No, it’s not perfect. Reviews suffer from a first-mover advantage.

But…I can often get a really good idea if I search for three recipes for the same thing and then compare what they have in common and where they differ. The comments are great, too - they point out flaws and potential substitutions.

Curated recipe sites are great, but very few of them have good quality control - there are some excellent recipes, and also some duds that you really wonder how they made it in there.

Spending an hour on Reddit or Twitter means downloading a few megabytes of content.

Spending an hour on YouTube means downloading a few gigabytes of content. The cost to serve that is massive.

YouTube lost money when Google bought them. It continued to lose money for years. It was only after YouTube finally got large enough and their ad targeting got good enough that they started to turn a profit on YouTube.

I’m really skeptical that anything other than a big tech company could provide a similar platform like that for free.

Sure, it could work if you could get people to pay $10/month, like YouTube Premium, but people wouldn’t do that without there being enough content to make it worthwhile. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The only way to get past that point is with a massive amount of initial investment.