Rottcodd

I would assume that this is just the first in what will be a widespread effort among red states to do the same.

Simply because banning abortion is essentially guaranteed to lead to an increase in pregnancy-related deaths, and that's a statistic that undermines the conservative position.

And it's ALWAYS the case that when truth is contrary to conservative positions, the positions don't change to accommodate the truth - the truth is hidden to protect the positions.

There is no "we" that's empowered to do anything on the fediverse, and that's by design.

You, as an individual, are free to start or register with whatever instance(s) you want and start, engage with, subscribe to or block whatever communities you want. And all the other users here are exactly equally free to do any or all of those things.

It's safe to assume that over time, activity will tend to concentrate in a few specific communities, and that most notable topics will come to have a dominant community. I think, snd self-evidently many others also think, that that's something that should happen organically over time rather than being forcibly implemented by some authority. But more to the point, that's something that only can happen organically and over time, since nobody has the authority to do it any other way.

That's what I expected from the start.

I guess I just assumed that that was commonly understood, As soon as I saw that it was going to be run according to Facebook's moderation standards, I took that to mean that it was going to be tailored to suit white supremacists and Christian nationalists, like Facebook.

Fuck no.

It's a Twitter knock-off managed by Facebook's parent company and marketed to Instagram users.

I'd be hard-pressed to think of any more instantly unappealing combination than that.

when that has been confirmed to not be the case

Quick epistemological clarification - nothing has been "confirmed" to be or not be the case.

It has been asserted by one of the actors that the action taken was not malicious or underhanded or whatever. In the simplest terms, in response to the accusation that they acted in a malicious way, one of the actors said the equivalent of "Did not!"

That might well be true. It might even be argued that it's likely true (though I would say that the combination of the backroom dealing with which it was done, the capricious way in which the decision was just presented to the community literally at the last second as a fait accompli, the opaque nature of the new instance and the arrogance and disdain displayed in the linked response all serve to undermine that likelihood). But the simple fact of the matter is that it's jtheust an assertion, and the truth value of that assertion cannot be known for a certainty by anyone else, so it does not and cannot rise to the level necessary to serve as "confirmation" of anything.

What they did is and should be allowed, simply because nobody has or should have the authority to prohibit them from doing it.

But it should also be the case that by abandoning the original community, they lost all claim to it, so anyone else who wants to should be free to claim it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's already the case, and if not, it should be.

Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...

Well... yes and no.

I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

It's easy and painless to create a new account with a different instance, so if the instance you're on isn't doing what you want, just delete that account and switch to a better instance.

There's nothing "hidden" about the dangers of the fediverse. They're there, and even obvious really, for anyone with the wit to see them.

It's a funny thing really, because one of the recurring things I see people say about the fediverse is that it reminds them of the early days of the internet - just people sharing stuff with people, without this whole layer of corporate scumbags squatting over everything, trying to extract profit.

And another of the hallmarks of the early days of the internet was that it was commonly understood that the ONLY person who could protect your privacy was you, and that you accomplished that by not being a dumbass.

It's really a very simple concept - if there's information about yourself that you don't want to be public property, YOU DON'T SHARE IT.

And if there's information about yourself that you don't want to be public property and you go ahead and share it anyway, well... you're a dumbass.

But somewhere along the way - somewhere between those early days of which the fediverse is reminiscent and today - we moved into an era in which the standard way to interact with the internet is to be a dumbass and share virtually everything, then go "Waaahh! Somebody needs to protect my privacy!"

No - you just need to stop being a dumbass.

Yes - the fediverse, due to its decentralized structure, is and will likely continue to be a threat to dumbasses, because there is no central authority that can be meaningfully tasked with protecting them from the consequences of their own dumbass actions or sanctioned for not doing so.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

In this context, "define" means to provide a specific meaning assigned to a word - to clarify exactly what it is that one intends to communicate when one uses that word.

Your turn.