As someone else said, you have to remain 100% private. The second you become publicly traded, that’s it.
Even then, if you want to make a difference in an established industry, you all but require preexisting deep pockets or some extremely disruptive technology that can’t be easily copied.
You then have to remain steadfast in the face of the ridiculous money that will be dangled in front of you to be bought out.
There’s a lot of stars that need to align.
For me, it has been a process of accepting that we can’t handwave actual opposing worldviews by talking about intelligence.
I know people who aren’t “smart” by most definitions, but who still have a lot of empathy and kindness. On the other hand, I have peers who I consider geniuses in their interests and fields, but with whom I struggled to find common ground politically.
It’s more useful to look at values. I can agree with most people in my life on the broad strokes. It’s when we get bogged down with micropolitics that fights happen.
I still think the public reaction to Luigi Mangione was a prime example of how people actually agree about a lot in this country, but frame it differently.
Paper notebooks.
I fully believe we’ve come full circle in that technology was intended to sort out the mess of physical documents, bookkeeping etc, but now is inherently messier by itself and you should go back to pen and paper.
It really depends on the age of the sender. 30s and younger: Fairly dismissive response. Not outright insulting but pretty rude. 40s and older: genuinely meant as an earnest acknowledgement of your message.
To chime in on the user creation thing:
I think it’s a natural part of decentralization that it’s harder for a single instance to get big enough to be the “go-to” for general users.
Having said that, I also think this will naturally happen over time. As long as the mechanical aspects of sign up are simple, it’s just a matter of users of a given instance to promote their instance.
World events also always play a role in encouraging a move to freer waters. Look at what happened with Mastodon and Bluesky (though Bluesky imo is just a big snooze button on a blaring alarm)