Cyberdog

Yes, that was the joke. Note that notch656a has posted pro-2A comments elsewhere in this hellthread.

> you should be aware that your choice of software will broadcast your political allegiance

No. I refuse to allow such a reality to manifest itself.

Use the software which best suits your needs. I will not assess your political beliefs based on your software choices and I ask that you do the same for me.

If I researched the political alignment of all the developers of the software I want to use and only choose software made by developers whose politics sufficiently align with mine, I'd never be able to get anything done.

A person who moves from Idaho to PR doesn't immediately become a citizen of PR, just like with France and Germany. They would still be eligible to vote absentee as a citizen of Idaho unless and until they become a citizen of PR.

Heck, I've voted absentee in my home county in California once while I was living in a different county in California.

> The fediverse culture is based around consent and guarding each other's safety.… If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you.

This just makes no sense. You can't paint a message on a billboard and then get angry when cars driving by can read it. If a group of people wants to post messages secretly amongst themselves, the Fediverse is the wrong place to do it. Use Telegram or a private Discord server or something, but even then screenshot leaks are bound to happen eventually.

If you are truly concerned about the safety of "vulnerable folks," you should be all for educating them on the true workings of the internet so that they can avoid publishing things they don't want the world to see. You are saying it's fine for them to use a system whose stated purpose is blasting messaged all across the internet to whoever wants to see them and then expecting all the recipients to know about and follow the unwritten rules they are somehow bound to when handling that message. That is not a realistic expectation.

Can you blame us, though?

Anyone who wants to legally drive or buy alcohol already has the required ID. Those that somehow do neither but still want to vote might still have a state-issued ID card for other ID purposes, and if they don't, well, the infrastructure to get them one already exists.

The blocker is actually checking those and thus reducing the cheating going on. And you can say the people who are for voting IDs are of a certain ideological bent, but that goes both ways, doesn't it?

If they have become a citizen of PR and aren't solely there on vacation (I believe the laws that define state citizenship themselves vary state-by-state), yes, they can't vote in federal elections. There are still local and territory-wide elections they can vote in.

This is silly, yes. The answer is making PR a state, but historically they haven't wanted to be one and Washington has been hesitant to make them one. Here is a short video on the matter which coincidentally was published a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk6JrUYLyWw

> You're mistaking the technical implementation of the Fediverse with the social contract that maintains its existence.

People are unpredictable. If there are "correct" ways of using the Fediverse, they need to be implemented into the code. Otherwise people can and will use it in whatever ways the code allows.

At any rate, there are many people, myself included, who don't really care if my posts get screenshotted or reposted outside of my server or circle of friends. How is someone supposed to determine to whom to apply this "social contract?"

Again, the default mode of thinking when posting anything to the internet should be "everyone, everywhere, forever into the future, will be able to see this." The Fedi is not immune from this rule.

> (That's also why the "quote tweet" feature from Twitter is absent on the Fediverse.)

It's absent from Mastodon. Other front ends support it. Not sure why Mastodon is holding out.

> Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.

Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.

Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied.

That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.

Advertisements. The plant is printing political advertisements in a newspaper-like format.

How interesting that an article about misleading usage of printing presses has a misleading headline.

"Life-changing decision?" My friend, you are signing up for an internet microblogging system, not getting married. I guess you're talking about what instance to create an account on, right? Well, you can create accounts on different instances if you want, and if you decide you don't like the instance your "main account" is on, you can migrate to a different one and all of your followers will still automatically follow you on the new one.

Not even sure what you're talking about with the "multifaceted" bit. There's nothing stopping you from following people posting about all of those topics at once, just like you can on Twitter. Go right ahead. If you're thinking you're limited to just following people on the same single-topic instance as you, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the network works.

As for "they need to fix this, and fast," presuming you actually do understand how federation works, then how do you propose it gets fixed without recentralizing everything?

If these people find that their desire to leave Twitter to spite Musk does not outweigh the friction of learning how a new piece of software works - a piece of software for which there is bountiful explanatory documentation and hundreds of friendly people more than willing to help explain how it works - then I guess they just really don't hate Musk all that much.

Precisely. The closest high speed rail train station to where I grew up would be… three hours away, maybe?

And no, there are no regional trains I could take to get there. I don't think there are any buses either.

The entire state is not the SF-LA corridor. That's my entire point.

Thank you for proving my point. Please look at a map of California and notice that the SF Bay Area is not directly south of the Oregon border; there's a huge space there. That's where I lived. It takes about as long to drive from my parents' place to San Francisco as it does to drive from San Francisco to LA.

I voted against high speed rail because it it wouldn't be serving anywhere near my area - I get it, the majority of the population lives on the coast between the Bay Area and San Diego, but why increase the tax burden on the people who live in the other 90% of the state who will likely never ride it? - and because I knew it would go over-budget and over-schedule.

Unsurprisingly, I got outvoted. And unsurprisingly, however many years and billions of dollars later, there are still no high speed trains running.

Then call them "posts." Everyone knows what that means, it's not Mastodon-specific, and it's not a euphemism for something associated with bodily function that I'm aware of.

Judging by how all the Mastodon sites seem to have minor CSS changes at most, I'd say not in any significant way. But there are other front ends for the Fediverse network. Perhaps check out instances running Pleroma, Misskey, or Soapbox and see if any of those suit you further. Some instances even run multiple front ends at once (typically on different subdomains) and you can use the same credentials to log in to all of them.

Yes, on Twitter, the fediverse ("Mastodon"), and other social networking services, it's typically quite trivial to build an echo chamber such that you rarely see opinions you don't want to see.

"But nazis exist on the fediverse!" Yes, they do, just as they do in real life. But if you don't intentionally attend their rallies or whatever it is nazis do nowadays and instead stick to whatever non-nazi-aligned places and activities you feel comfortable with, you're probably not going to encounter any of them.

All right, well, I respect you for trying, at any rate. Politics just poisons everything, I suppose.

I've seen a couple "free speech" instances in the list, yes.

You're overthinking it. Find an instance that seems friendly and sign up. If it turns out you don't like it there, you can migrate to another one; barring defederation issues, everyone who is following you on the old instance will follow you on the new one automatically. Unfortunately the list of people that you follow isn't automatically migrated, but some front ends reduce the pain of this by letting you export a list of follow-ees on the old instance and then import it on the new one.

Just do it!

Did you make the arguments in good faith and in a manner inviting productive discourse, or did you mock and name-call?

I'm not saying that doing the former won't get you blocked too by rightists who basically just want their own echo chambers, but the latter seems to be the default level of discourse on Twitter when talking to the "other," so if that's what you defaulted to, I'm not too surprised you were shown the door.

Still others would rather just have a place to avoid politics altogether. My main account is on phpc.social which is supposed to be a hub for the PHP community, but recently there's been an uptick of people joining (or re-activating old accounts) and posting or reposting political nonsense. Quite annoying.

My framing is honest because we're not only talking about people who hate Jews here. We're talking about people who do not accept the "correct" narrative on things like the results of major elections, medical science and the involvement of large corporations therein, etc. In recent years there have been a lot of statements which have gotten people in trouble on Twitter (and, in some cases, real life) which have nothing to do race or religion.

I don't believe most of these arguments, but I still think people ought to be able to say them.

You can block users on Twitter, yes. In fact, in some circles, "block chains" (no relation to the crypto-related tech) are popular; the idea being that you use a script to not only block one person, but subsequently block everyone that follows or is followed by that person, then block those that follow or are followed by those people, and so on to a certain level of depth - kind of a "curse you and your offspring for ten generations" sort of vibe. I suppose in a way this is functionally similar to blocking an entire instance on the fediverse.

Not sure if you can block hashtags or something like that on Twitter.

Yes, the shitheads will go where they are tolerated. So do people who aren't necessarily bad people but still want to share opinions which may be outside what is currently the orthodox way of thinking. If that alone makes someone a shithead to you…

But if you really don't want to see arguments about Jews or whatever, just don't follow anyone who posts that. And if someone you follow does start with that stuff, just unfollow them, perhaps block them. In that manner it works the same way as on Twitter; once you have a solid base of sane people you're following, it's hard to just stumble across content that upsets you unless you're actively looking for it.

Yeah, I saw the 90-day-thing-plus-severance in a later article. Assuming that's the one that's true… Jesus, that's a life-changing firing.

The way I've put it in other threads is: the "free speech" fediverse, the "safe space" fediverse, and the MAP fediverse.

It's a bit unfair to solely consider American politics - there are plenty of Europeans on the fediverse, on both sides of the divide. And not everyone who prefers the more chaotic free speech servers are alt-right, unless you're one of those people who considers all non-leftists to be alt-right nowadays.

I don't really relate or sympathize with the Silicon Valley types, no. I don't do the yoga and $8 latte-shakes and the Kegerators and Ping-Ping tables; I come into an office I rent myself in a flyover state, do a full day of work, and then go home, usually after sundown, seven days a week, and I make a lot less than those kids in California do. So it doesn't really burn me up to see the less productive ones trimmed off.

I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either.

If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.

Government fetishism. The threat they "post" to some abstract concept like "the republic" is not more important than the threat they pose to their fellow man.