edgerunneralexis

Gotta be a tie between Pet Semetary and Blindsight, although for different reasons.

This article is also really good: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including

It goes into detail on a real world athletics study (instead of studies on individual factors like muscle mass or grip strength that may not be representative at all of sport performance) in running that shows that after transitioning, trans women perform the same relative to their cis women peers as they did to their cis male peers prior to transitioning — i.e., same place in the distribution curve.

Yup, that's honestly the history of the world — people giving their autonomy and independence and concern for what's really going on in the world away to authorities in exchange for ease, comfort, convenience and habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It's the eternal struggle against apathy.

Whoops! Fixed. Thanks

It would be amazing if Lemmy implemented silencing/muting instances, it would make a great middle ground between fully federating or defederating so that it's less binary and absolutist, and allows more individual freedom within mod actions. I think having a spectrum of choices when it comes to interaction will help social media networks a lot, because it means there are more ways to deal with problems and it more mirrors real life social groups, which means the dynamics are less artificial and distorted.

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.

Well, yeah you shouldn't shit on them for not having gotten to features you want yet, but it's also okay to talk about how important and crucial some features are. And yes, I agree that the best solution is to lend them a hand in building the features you want! I know Rust pretty well and would love to help out tbh, but I have a serious disability that makes extended focus on cognitive tasks very difficult and deleterious, so all I can really do rn is cheer other people on.

Also I've heard the main two Lemmy devs are actually being paid to work on it, which isn't surprising to me as a lot of software companies will pay their employees to work on open source projects. So it isn't totally free labor.

I agree that those are the three really big flaws that need to be fixed ASAP. Especially one and three. Without those, the federated/decentralized nature of Lemmy is hamstrung. With them, it becomes much more powerful. We need to get the devs on these flaws before Lemmy blows up more than it already has, everything else can wait imo

Me irl

We need to crowd source a common list of instances to block from users and mods across the network for instances to use, like people on Mastodon started doing. It was really effective. Defederation is really the only way to deal with / only check on users that sign up on instances that don't moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators can't effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. That's why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise it'd be filled with trolls doing their thing with absolute impunity and there would be nothing mods, who are supposed to be the first line of defense for that kind of thing, could do,

So in terms of beehaw vs lemmy.world I would be on instance 3 - I can see and participate both, their defederation from each other doesn't affect you, it only affects the users of beehaw or Lemmy.world

This aspect is really crucial for people to understand, so I wanted to emphasize it. This is what gives the Fediverse it's hyper free nature, where if you don't like which instances your instance has chosen tp block, you can always switch to a third instance and have access to both your old instance (thus solving the network effect) and the new one (thus giving you freedom of association). This sort of connected-by-default design choice (I.e. using blacklists instead of whitelists) is also crucial for maintaining the general interconnectivity of the network thats crucial to its functioning.

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