Outside the US people use WhatsApp and other third party messengers so none of that is necessarily a big issue. As for teenagers they mostly use Snapchat and Instagram for groupchats nowadays.

It’s been like that ever since Apple Music became a thing. I remember fiddling with this on an iPhone 6.

Put a sticky ad banner to the bottom instead of mixing it with the results?

How about: zero ads permitted at all?

I know plenty of “regular” people saying “f this, it’s all ads, can’t even find anything anymore!”

It’s still cheaper to buy the same $2, hell, $20 app again once the compatibility breaks than keeping all the subscriptions going on forever.

I don't think it's doable with the current model of social media but:

1. prohibit all sorts of advertising, explicit and implicit, and actually ban users for it. The reason most people try to get big on SM is so they can land sponsorships outside of the app. But we'd still have the problem of telling whether something is sponsored or not.

2. no global feed, show users what their friends/followers are doing only. You can still have discovery through groups, directories, etc. But it would definitely be worse UX than what we currently have.

For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc.

The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.

Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.

It’s like that in many countries in Europe as well.

The ones who will “always be there” can get their papers for permanent residence done and vote. If they don’t want to (or can’t since they don’t have the legal grounds to even stay there for longer), then they shouldn’t have a say on decisions that can permanently change things about the place.

There will always be the population of people who will be in short term housing or similar situations, but due to their circumstances the individual people will come and go. 5 years from now the makeup of the itinerant population may be almost entirely different, but the people in that population are in the same circumstances, especially if they don't have any political representation.

Who is going to speak for the people who aren't allowed to vote?

In my country, citizens without a permanent address (which is very few people, those who have no place of theirs mostly register at someone elses for easier administration) can still sign up and vote, so that leaves us with just the people who don’t have the permits to even stay here permanently.

I’m also not expecting to fly to country X, book an airbnb for 6 months or get a summer job, and then just somehow be entitled to vote there.

That is only possible with stable and legal housing. Not everyone is privileged to be in that situation, especially not with the housing market in many countries.

With your thinking you are creating a class of subhumans where you enjoy the benefits of their labour but you are not allowing them to vote. Like African Americans in the US not that long ago.

No, it's actually nothing like us. It's also annoying and insulting that we have to be the symbol for every victim of anything.

Black Americans are not nomads. We're forced out by them.

I’m not talking about nomads. I’m talking about people who live there for years, sometimes decades

What exactly is your current legal status in Amsterdam and the Netherlands/EU?

Yes, because they don’t legally permanently live in that place. Sorry not sorry. Why do you think anyone can just sign up for some local elections and vote for a town they’re not even legally permanently situated in??