The very idea is absurd. It is so counter productive to the idea of rehabilitation. The prisons themselves say they aren’t a significant revenue stream. Trying to offset the cost of a societal need by charging fees to prisons doesn’t even make any sense. And the companies that are tasked with collecting this debt get 70% of what they collect which means that even the argument about offsetting the state’s cost doesn’t make sense.

It’s profit seeking, counter productive cruelty and that’s it. Just shameful.

If you can’t afford basic necessities on minimum wage, the wage is too low and the job doesn’t deserve to exist IMO.

Especially when so many of the largest companies are profitable and making more and more money. This system is unsustainable. It also causes societal unrest which leads to extremism. I don’t understand the mindset behind it, the increasing polarization as things get more and more unaffordable seems to support the theory.

The easiest two ways are to either pay per mile, or just add the round trip time to whatever their pay is. There might be some small complaints and attempts to abuse. But the complaining is easy to deal with and I think the abuse would be small and could be dealt with in similar ways as other time theft is dealt with.

For me at least, there’s just not enough content. Not enough communities, with not enough posts with not enough comments. Lemmy still hasn’t reached that tipping point where it can replace sites like Reddit. It fluctuates, but I think it is on the way.

I think it still needs to grow and get more stable. I find any browsing all that there isn’t enough there for me to use it in the same way I used reddit.

For the first month or so, I would say it was about 40% of my SNS usage, now it’s probably about 20-30%. Hopefully as more and more people use it, we get more users and more stable instances.

I would never consider sending a .7z unless I had no choice. It’s like sending a .ODT instead of a .DOCX. There’s just no reason to make things more complicated.

It is obviously. Just look at what Lemmy and Mastadon are. The whole concept of the fediverse is trying to get back to old school, smaller and less controlled services like message boards, IRC, etc.

Most younger, less tech savvy people don’t care about those principles. They just want a cool place with a bunch of people.

Hopefully the balance will shift a little bit to get more diversity and more users in general. In the last few days, stability issues and lack of content have lowered my engagement. It’s early days still though, so hopefully the people developing and hosting these sites keep plugging away and more people come to make it worthwhile.