"Mastodon" isn't a social media company, you know, right?
It's a piece of microblogging software (written by Mastodon Gmbh), that one can install on their own server to host microblogging, optionally intercommunicating with other servers who do so.
Whether there is advertisement installed on any same server also running mastodon is entirely left at the discretion of the people who had said server deployed.

Some Mastodon servers decide to only rely on donations. Others might decide to rely on advertisement (Truth Social and Gab are example of servers running mastodon and receiving money from some form of advertisement).

But, no. I doubt that "Mastodon" (As in servers on which Mastodon code is deployed) will "take over" the advertisers of Twitter at any time.

A per your own source, it's 500million pairs of eyeballs.
The same source liste more than a billion for each of Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, Linkedin, ...
Even Snapchat has more users. Fucking Snapchat.
X is peanuts.

Oh, poor you! Still didn't get over for that time you got slapped in the face with a large trout when you tried to tweet your opinion about the great replacement?

Seizing the assets of the wealthy might pay for UBI... for one year. Then what?

Yup.

Sucks so much that in fact I'm wondering if CEO John Pettigrew isn't overly optimistic in expecting the current crop of "Just make the datacenter even larger and AGI will surely emerge out of the next 5.0 version of CludeGPT or BingBard or whatever..." money burning bullshit "start-ups" will still be around in 10 years.

On the other hand bullshit like Tesla's "Full Self Driving" has constantly been promised for "next year" for approximately the last decade, so it's not impossible that by 2034 the same usual suspect will still be around, still promising that AGI is just right at the corner if we "just" let them boil of a few more lakes to cool their newest nuclear-powered "Zetta-scale" data center. (While, please, ignoring the Habsburg level of inbreeding of their models due to all the botshit leaked on the internet).

As John Maynard Keynes famously observed: markets can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

We used to have a similar model, until they did away with the license nonsense and simply started funding public television from general taxes. The 5 people with no TV set complained for a while. But the savings were massive as there was no longer a need for an expensive enforcement agency.

No. It was not punitive damage.
Apple dropped their lawsuit and was settled out of court.

(Among other, because if Apple persisted in court, Microsoft was menacing to completely with draw MS-Office from macOS which could have completely killed Apple. So that's why Apple accepted to settle even if in practice they would probably have had a ground to sue. Of course, it was also Microsoft's best interest to settle instead of completely crushing Apple, with all the FTC shenanigans happening).

Technically they didn't get caught stealing they mere were alleged to be stealing, with the lawsuit being dropped.

(Yes, Microsoft probably stole tons of shit as they usually do. They just managed to avoid having a judge confirm it this time.)

Sorry, but you read too fast. I didn't say "invest"(*), I said "investigated":

Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990

Microsoft was in legal troubles due to monopolistic practices.

This is probably what led them to decide to settle out of court and pay those 150$ million you mention (as part of the settlement) rather than try to completely crush Apple. Given the warchest of Microsoft, they could probably have been able to go to court and extended the legal battle for long enough until Apple goes bankrupt and disappears (with Microsoft buying up the remnants).

But doing so (killing off Apple and ingesting it) would probably have looked very bad in their other lawsuit about monopoly. Letting Apple live another day (and, as you point out, spinning the public opinion as "Microsoft investing into Apple to save them!") was probably the smart move to reduce the antitrust troubles.

Regarding the long list of products destroyed by Microsoft's ruthless practices:
Yup. There's a reason why the Microsoft Cuisine joke is so funny: it definitely close to how most of the Microsoft related accident happened back then.

(Was using Stac' Stacker during my DOS days back then).
(Of course a pirated copy, because as a teenagers I was too broke to either afford a bigger disk or even buy the software).

---

(*): though yes, the source I point at does mention the 150$ millions, without expanding on their context (as an out-of-court settlement).

Plus you'll be stuck for 3 hours in a TSA queue.

Maybe. Still, it's nicer to listen to a dreamer than a naysayer, even if the latter is right. I miss the optimism mankind used to have.

Again: the idea is not to convince individual parents, but to change culture. Starting with the schools, perhaps. It won't be just your kid being without a cellphone then, will it? Sometimes it really does take a village...

That's why the author proposes a culture change; obviously you're not going the change anything by being the only parent to follow his advise. Thankfully, parents and educators are becoming more aware of the negative effects of cell phones on kids, and this article hopefully will add a little more fuel to that fire.

A little while ago cell phones were banned from primary schools here in the Netherlands. Since the start of this year, they are banned from high school classrooms as well; schools can choose how to implement this (for instance: let the kids keep their phones in their lockers, and allow use during breaks). Not a complete break with cell phones, but it's an important start.

Speculations cross my mind:

One of the explanations I've heard about why Win95 merely only "nearly did kill Apple" instead of "completely killing" it, is that Microsoft was being investigated for antitrust since 1990 and definitely needed to still have a somewhat not completely dead Apple around to point at whenever the word "monopoly" came in the discussion. (see: this article)

If Microsoft had launched an Apple-crusher a bit earlier, they would still have launched it during their antitrust lawsuit era, so they would still need to keep Apple on life support.
They would still need to put efforts in keeping Apple alive to avoid getting accused monopoly.

Not sure what they are trying to achieve in the lawsuit, TBH. They've already fixed the model, so their prayer for relief can't be that. Damages? Doubt, given that it took some major backflips for NY to create the duplicates, and they were likely the only such dups... unless something turns up in discovery, I guess.

Maybe. Before we had Office 365, Office did not need any selling point besides the fact that everyone else was using it. And before we had Office 365, we often had document management systems that were actually any good*, and allowed easy sharing and managing access to documents. But it seems we have largely forgotten about those**

*) Sharepoint is definitely not one of them, I'd hesitate to call it a document management system of any quality.
**) Thanks to Sharepoint.

LibreOffice is there for the using. And no we don't need this cloud crap.

Absolutely. That is not "a problem", that is its purpose. They've floated similar ideas in the EU with regards to free speech, and it is the same approach they have taking with banks being tasked to police illicit transactions.