Olives @olives@qoto.org

*in practical terms

Searching the fediverse and finding a tiny number of hits. Ugh.

This guy is also fond of the idea of having "Facebook run the place", as if people couldn't get away from Facebook fast enough, and as if that was ever a realistic goal (given that the whole point is decentralization...).

While defederation is a blunt instrument, and it is probably used by some instances far too much for reasons unrelated to that, it's kind of rich for someone to smear mud onto someone, then to ask them to make themselves even more vulnerable to having mud smeared on them.

I saw a very strange take.

Someone wrote a literal hit piece about the fediverse, cherry-picking posts from *January*, using unreliable algorithms, and still making the fediverse look, in practical terms, clear of actual child porn (even where there might be a problem).

But, then, they were like...

Defederation is a blunt instrument. If an instance has something you believe to be real child porn, and they don't take it down, we shouldn't be in the business of blocking instances, we should just block that one post.

???

When you see / hear of things like this, you almost imagine someone with an American flag on their clothes angrily screaming, "Does anyone here know English?!"

She was also very preoccupied about the lives of black people there, because that is a big part of American culture, even though there are hardly any such people there, and there isn't that same dark history of slavery that usually underlies American discourse around this.

It all felt very, very strange.

Some of the things were embarrassingly bad.

If one idiot has a bad opinion, everyone has a bad opinion.

If one engages in a bizarre practice, the entire country does.

If one school engages in an archaic practice, all the schools do.

And so on.

I still remember when a half-Japanese woman, who grew up in New York, flew to Japan and started writing extremely racist things for the rest of the world.

Very casually and very misleadingly.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jul/26/ghana-abolishes-death-penalty-with-expected-reprieve-for-176-condemned-prisoners Ghana abolishes the death penalty (except for high treason).

When you wake up, look at the Internet, and there are puritans with ridiculous takes, authoritarians with a fetish for State control, someone talking about how wretched, miserable, and worthless their life is and how they want to just end it, and other "delightful" things.

why