This was an absolutely wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing

Yeah I really don't want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we've built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭

What in the god damn

Just because they said they weren't? They just dismissed the claim without linking to any real counter evidence by claiming it's just a random Mastodon user or whatever

I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands to just have a single model for all countries, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we'll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks "sideloading" when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you're outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.

Also, to be fair, there's much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don't have an overall karma score, so there's not really any incentive to karma farm.

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

Here's the money part of the article for anyone who doesn't want to click through:

the most clear-cut example of this suppression is happening in Montana, where a drag ban was passed this year. Like most of this crop of drag bans, the Montana law was so broad and overly vague that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra could be considered “obscene” if its third clarinet player was transgender. Despite assurances from Montana Republicans that their drag ban had nothing to do with transgender people, the first application of the law was to ban a transgender person from speaking at a public library, based on the legal advice of county attorneys.

The event was not drag. It was a presentation on the history of trans and two-spirit people being given as part of Pride month. The speaker, Adria Jawort, was not presenting obscene material. She was not dressing or acting in a way meant to titillate. She was going to give a history lesson in a public library, and the government effectively said, “No, it is illegal for that person to do so because they are trans and dressing in a manner consistent with their gender identity, even if the way they dress is legal for other individuals.”

In other words, if a cisgender (non-transgender) person presented that same material, it would be legal. But for a transgender person to present it, they would have to detransition (i.e., erase themselves). When the government tells a class of people that they cannot speak in public and cannot express themselves in a way that everyone else can (with clothing that is perfectly acceptable in public for everyone else), this is a clear violation of the First Amendment. And yet there’s nary a peep from the people who promised to march with trans people or defend freedom of speech to the death, because they cared first and foremost about ensuring that they retained their own commercial platforms, while painting trans people as the villains.

...

When it comes to trans people, the right seemingly wants to go even further to curtail their constitutional rights. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has been campaigning on the idea that transgender people are why teen girls attempt suicide. This is patent nonsense, of course: Teen suicide rates are lowest in states where trans people are protected by law and highest in the state (Idaho) that has led the charge to ban them from sports and locker rooms. Haley, however, singles out comedian and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney in particular as a cause of teen girls contemplating suicide.

“Make no mistake. That is a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women. Women don’t act like that. Yet everybody’s wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?” Haley said of the TikTok celebrity. Most of Mulvaney’s videos are fluff—a video diary along with makeup, hair, and skin care tips: stuff that any cisgender social media influencer would have no trouble posting. But the implication by Haley is clear: Transgender people, and content, must be removed from anywhere that might be seen by people under 18, even if the content itself is innocuous.

Pause for a moment to consider: This is a serious GOP candidate for president strongly implying that the government should ensure that a class of people are denied access to social media and forbidden from putting content featuring themselves on the internet. It is hard not to draw comparisons to Germany’s banning Jews from writing for newspapers in 1933, then banning them from stage and screen in 1934.

On that last point, the literal Lemkin Institute, the organization founded in memory of the man who invented the term genocide, thinks today's anti-trans movements are possibly genocidal.

Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it's hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse

I hope so! I'm definitely going to do my best to promote Lemmy on Reddit in those niche communities. I wish I had the time and personality to actually start the communities I want to see on Lemmy, but sadly I don't.

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven't been back there once since. We need more people doing this.