I would assume some of that is acqui-hiring. Google acquires a company and looks at which employees are the outstanding talent. The best employees are poached for projects Google cares about while the rest are left to keep the product going without the thought leaders who built it.
I would go a step further and say that it should not be a stock purchase but partial nationalization. The government is not getting shares that will be sold later. The government is getting a right to appoint part of the board of directors. Every time the company issues a dividend, buys back stock, or engages in other activities to return value back to the shareholders, a proportional amount of money must be paid to the treasury. It only makes sense that if a company is so big that its failure is going to hurt society as a whole, it should be owned by society.
The problem is not even big trucks. It is medium speed collisions with barriers. Kei trucks typically don’t have air bags or a crumple zone. They are designed for low speed driving on open roads.
I have found sorting by “active” to be the best sort order. It seems to be mostly immune to concentrated clumps, though it is very slow changing.
I can see why others might find those features useful, but I am not bothered by any of it. To me, Twitter was a (micro) blogging site, so I treated it as such. I found organizations/creators that I wanted to follow and read my feed in chronological order.
I don’t care about likes and retweets, because every tweet in my feed was coming from a source I wanted to hear from. Reply count did matter, but mostly to know that there were responses.
I never cared what was trending because it was never something I cared about.
I only used search to find specific users (though it is easy enough to find them by Googling or looking for a link on that user’s website) and,.on very rare occasions, I would search for my city or neighborhood name to see if there was a cause to be commotion I was seeing
I never cared who other users followed or were followed by. Even looking at my own followers was an exercise in who stroking.
My biggest complaint about Mastodon is that none of the users I would want to follow are on it yet. It is not a big enough issue to keep me on Twitter but there is no reason for me to join Mastodon either (as a lurker and occasional replyer).
It would be a nice gesture, but I will believe those promises of support when they have teeth to them.
What happens if they stop doing it? Do I have to sue them for breach of contract, have to prove actual damages, and settle the class action lawsuit for $5 in store credit?
What happens if the company goes bankrupt or creates a new subsidiary to service the product and the subsidiary folds?
What level of support are they obligated to provide? What issues must be fixed and how promptly?