Olives @olives@qoto.org

If he loves Elon or Mark so much, he can go use Facebook or Twitter... Sheesh.

*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

Quite a few posts trickling in. Yeah, down with KOSA.

This is obviously a pretty big invasion of privacy, and I'm wondering what exactly it is that's spurred this.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/checkpoints/202306/kids-math-and-reading-scores-drop-but-is-it-sgnificant A good new article from Dr. Ferguson about math and reading scores in light of covid-19 and how some reactions to it might be a bit exaggerated.

This sounds like something which calls for Dr. Ferguson. Buster of video game moral panics.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-esrb-wants-to-start-using-facial-recognition-to-check-peoples-ages/ The ESRB wants to scan your face to guess your age to control what video games minors can play and how much of it they can play.

Ugh, is it another video game related moral panic...?

I don't usually cover these ones, however, since it intersects with the First Amendment and the Internet, I'll give a crack at it.

I think that, yeah, it's a clear 1A violation for a sex offender to be forced to go around social media with a mark of shame.

It's compelled speech. This is ipso facto a First Amendment violation.

Even if it's an awful person, I don't really want to be making exceptions here and there, on principle.

Also, this sounds like a good way to attract harassment and to avoid positive socialization. Their families might also be harassed.

Someone who is up to evil could likely find a way around this. This is going to hit someone acting in good faith, rather than a bad actor.

You also have to consider that some sex crimes are more or less heinous than others. Does it make sense to treat a more minor one the same as the worst of the worst?

Also, some of these were committed as *minors*.

Rather than writing dry hit pieces, they could instead, I dunno, talk to admins to tell them about cases they know of of this?

No one likes a "clever" guy lecturing them from up above.

Ire about the fediverse originates primarily from right wing figures who are really upset about the fact that people are not jumping up and down in excitement in response to Elon acquiring Twitter.