quickleft

I wonder if he's willing to keep going hard and tank his own defense.

If he was, and his lawyers were willing and able, I still don't know what it would look like. Maybe maneuver some kind of disclosures that wouldn't otherwise be available. But that was suppose to be the case with Ghizlane Maxwell too and look how it turned out.

In terms of broad social effects, Shinzo Abe is the only example to look at that I'm aware of.

probably not what you were imagining, but here's one of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionne_quintuplets

If it wasnt too many in this context youd be posting some very cute pics instead.

You could go old school and put up posters on the street. or if there are any local message boards

like physical message boards

put up a notice. Sometimes grocery stores, convenience stores, parks, bars, coffee shops or other gathering places have these.

@nightauthor@kbin.social I don't think you followed the story here.

The issue was the use of a specific word, that is now uncouth, but with which OP identifies

The author of this post is not trans. A trans person is someone who is assigned a sex at birth (usually based on apparent genitalia) who as they mature, feels this to have been incorrect. OP provides the following personal context and maybe this confused:

I was a bisexual male who was programming computers and having having gay sex in 1984, when most of the people online today weren't even born yet. I was wearing makeup and dresses in public, before the Calckey crowd had even heard of the word "drag".

He describes himself as a bisexual male. He feels the need to substantiate this by mentioning a specific time(s) he had sex with another man, in 1984. Being bisexual does not give you a free pass to stop learning for 40 years.

He then starts talking about drag. Drag is an exaggeration of gender characteristics and display for the purpose of entertainment. Drag happens in a show, a performance, on a stage. While there is overlap between drag cultures and trans people, trans people do not really appreciate being thought of as "in drag" because they are not putting on a show, they are just going about their lives. He describes himself as cross dressing as a way to sort of give the impression that he should be permitted to use in-group slang. He also goes on to mention that in the past he has read comments on the internet using this word as self description. Which for someone who thinks they are such an independent thinker, standing up against group think, the rationalization of "I read it on the internet" as an excuse for anything really is pretty weak shit.

Sounds like when he was a young person he experimented with feminine fashion styles but wasn't motivated to keep at it. Lots of cis (non trans) guys wear a dress, eyeliner, nailpolish etc on occasion, especially in youth. It is irrelevant to the question at hand. Probably it served to reinforce his masculine identity. A lot of people try something like that out and go "nah, not for me". Even some cis men continue with cross dressing as a recreational activity over the years, but without any desire to transition to female in their day to day. Those guys are also not trans.

Later, he justifies the comment he made as

a playful suggestion of my sexual openness towards transsexual people.

Was anybody asking if he was sexually open to trans people? From how the original context is described, I do not see any indication that the sexual attractiveness of trans people was a topic of conversation. The original meme was a picture of someone's front lawn.

As a general rule: It is not considered polite to bring your sexual thoughts into public conversation. I disagree that the comment would have been innocuous if he had used different language. From his own description it sounds like he was making a gross, creepy comment.

I've definitely been misunderstood myself,

This person wasn't misunderstood. He does not understand. And from the evidence presented, he doesn't care to. He replied to a post containing 3 words. 2 of which he didn't understand. And there is nothing to show any curiosity whatsoever. The crux of his argument seems to be that young people are always wrong.

He also seems to think it self evident that he is too old to learn. Hard disagree from me on that one too. Lots of old people keep learning right up til their last day on earth. Even older than he is. He is making a choice because it reinforces his self-image of being a contrarian without any effort. I kept expecting some sort of nuance to appear in the article because the page was so long but I don't think there is literally a single sentence int he whole thing that even suggests he used his brain for anything other than feeling sad for himself.

from what i gather in the blog post, this person actively seeks out spaces which are "run by yo-yos" then complains about it.

This guy wrote a long-self pitying blog post about how he has been victimized due to not having got the memo about T------ being a slur. He claims to have been acting in good faith but misunderstood. It is extremely boring cataloguing various accounts and how he has been mistreated everywhere. He narrates his participation in communities where by his own accounting, he plainly does not understand the topic at hand and was being argumentative and trollish. Apparently he received bad vibes from this which I think is meant to evoke sympathy.

Eventually we get to the conflict (such as there is any) in the story when he makes a weird fetishising comment containing a slur. From the context provided I don't really get the impression that it was a place where sexual comments were probably on topic and I am guessing it would still have been creepy if he expressed a similar thought without using a slur.

The author uses the unredacted slur throughout the post. There is nothing resembling evidence that he has taken any time at all to attempt to learn what the "misunderstanding" was.

Just to show how easy it is to find, here is the wikipedia which is shorter than this comment^1^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranny

He concludes with what I think due to the formatting is a ?poem?. You do not have to read any of the rest of it you will understand everything from this:

Welcome to this corner of the Fediverse.

You can move all your followers, in theory.

Your censor is not a black-box Algorithm, but a community of fallible, groupthink-infected people. Beware the tyranny of the majority.

Your new overlord is not some evil corporate Billionaire, but an entirely like-able nonbinary Jewish Gay hacker who is a wise idiot at UC Irvine.

• By "the majority" he means 5 accounts who reported him as using prejudicial language and 1 mod who banned him. So that would be 6 people. Out of an n of ??? 7 billion ???
• What do jewish people have to do with this?
• Ditto to UC irvine
• and non-binary people make no obvious appearance in this story
• But really what do jewish people have to do with this? do you think that makes you look like not a bigot?
• Calling people "groupthink-infected" and "idiots" when you are being willfully ignorant

He is assuming the reason why people disagree with him is because they are stupid and manipulable rather than because he is wrong. He is complaining because he accidentally called a group of people by a slur and was shown the door as a consequence. Because he has failed to take the opportunity to learn anything from the situation, he is unable to engage with the issues. So most of the "argument" of this post consists of more name calling.

In summary, I disagree with the title. This is not interesting.

1 - pot calling the kettle black when it comes to being longwinded here :D

I’ve seen lots of people say “federation is like email”, but to me it’s like Usenet.

You are correct but since 99.99% of people do not know what usenet is, it would be a pointless analogy. :) To be more specific than federation being like usenet: usenet was/is federated.

A couple years ago I was telling a 20something about usenet and I started to explain it the same way I always have: "It's like an email discussion list---" but I was interrupted for a question: "what's an email discussion list?" And this was a person who would describe themselves as geeky and good with computers. But has had no reason to interact with ancient techs like mailman. So first I had to explain what is an email list, which actually my friend thought sounded like a great idea. But having no experience of it, the ways in which usenet is an improvement were slightly lost.

the the Usenet server doesn’t matter at all like a Fedverse server does.

this is totally not the case. your usenet server mattered a lot and some people would even pay to subscribe to servers in addition to what was provided by their ISP to access all the content they were interested in.

usenet was a federated forum where messages were exchanged between servers with relationships with each other. Sometimes there would be no server connection between you and another user. So you would see replies directed at a person but you would never see their posts directly. The situation could be mutual, or not. Some servers would send messages to anyone who asked but only pick up from their chosen sources. IME the more physically remote someone was, the more likely there would be hiccups in communication.

also servers would pick and choose what groups they would even pick up. it was a whole thing.

On usenet there was no one central "truth" or baseline. Everyone was always working with pieces.

Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them.

Well. Usenet arose during a time when computers were only available to people who were all or most of the following: wealthy, white, formally educated at the post secondary level, professionally employed, affiliated with a western university, fluent in English, male, associated with the "defense" industry. Presumably most people who were on Usenet in 1980 had a good understanding of the technology.

But you sound as though you are being nostalgic for this extremely exclusionary time in computing. Having been in rooms as described above, it is not as interesting as you'd think. Homogeneous. Rigid. Boooring.

Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.

Why would anyone do that in 2023 when usenet is full of spam. It would only be an academic exercise unless you are looking to download pirated content. In which case usenet is quite a popular choice. Usenet's traffic has increased steadily year over year as it has transitioned into a media sharing platform. But you mean the forum side of things. Probably because you yourself have "sadly" not done any of the things you are crying about other people not doing you are not even sure what is going on.

Expanding on this, I’m worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth.

It's off topic but on this you are correct from what I understand. I can't find in my bookmarks right now but I recall having read some research about how younger people (b >~2000) lack understandings of things like file systems and other computer basics. In their experience these things have always been very obscured. So they are very good at the things they have experience with, but actual understanding of "computers" is minimal.

Comparing to "homesteading" is an interesting choice. Perhaps to you the term bears connotations of freedom, community, adventure, creativity or nostalgia. But a more comprehensive view would be that the state used extreme violence to appropriate land and natural resources from an existing population. Homesteading was the subsequent privatization of the nominally public lands. It was privatized specifically into the hands of people who it was thought would be loyal and suitable, if sometimes remote, subjects of the state. Their loyalty was reinforced by arranging things so that the settlers were perpetually engaged in relationships of domination either directly or implicitly, with the prior residents of the land and other conquered people.

I guess I am wondering.... to follow your analogy... you think you/we are the settlers in this situation? Seems like Meta is the state/military. Their users are the homesteaders and the libre community is the historic but already weakened pre existing communities.

Just like so called "pioneers", meta users as people can have all kinds of good intentions at the outset however the situation is one of inherent tensions. The territory is vast and we are in a relatively weakened position. Therefor, we unable to defend it sufficiently to prevent incursions, even if we were all in agreement about wanting to. The conquering institutions will enter and they will bring people along under various pretenses, with messaging and structures that favor the extension of their power. Some settlers will defect but most will just try to make it work in the context they find themselves--- like people always do. Structurally, we are in conflict even though as individuals I don't think anyone bears particular ill will towards the other. And in both the historical and contemporary situations, the groups are not completely distinct and clear cut. Humans instantly become intertwined with one another when the opportunity arises so there is plenty of intermingling and relationships.

However if the sight of platoons and caravans approaching in the distance leads to apprehension, the ominous feeling is justified. We must represent our own interests, and what are arguably the broader interests of humanity, using tactics from diplomacy to guerilla. We should be vigilant in self defense and not wait til its too late to engage whatever potentially effective means are available to us. I am not sure what those are.

(In case it is not clear, I hope I am not read as flippantly comparing anything happening to lemmy as equivalent to the horrors of genocide. This situations has the violence dial turned waaaaay down. However there are certain narrative elements that bear a similarity so I wanted to expand upon the analogy to colonization as a positive thing at all, and one that we are on the winning side of.)

This analogy keeps being made but I am not convinced it is correct.

Any participant in a dynamic network can choose with whom to have relationships. That's the point of a firewall or cloudflare or a million other security efforts.... to prevent interactions which due to malice or accident would cause some harm to come to the local system. There is no obligation to participate and in fact with the fediverse it is specifically designed with defederation in mind.

The comparison has been made to email explaining the fediverse concept to new users. Most people know about email. But Usenet is much more apt, if you are familiar with that. Usenet had (has) similar concepts such as the way servers share, mirror and distribute content from others servers. There is a burden imposed on any given server according to the others it has communication with. If you never had the pleasure of being on Usenet, it was basically like email discussion lists where the inbox was public. But you still needed to have access to a server to read and post. Messages were sent in similar way to email but every server would retain a copy of messages prior to forwarding them on to a list of other servers. They would in this was percolate through the network. Every server had its own version of the history of usenet according to the choices of the admins and there was not central authority or main copy.

Usenet server admins exercised broad discretion deciding who they would have a relationship with and what they would accept. Nobody was every perfectly connected to everybody else for various reasons including: legality, morals, politics, technical, geography, taste and happenstance. Individual people, hosts that allowed too many bad users, problem communities, filetypes, topics of conversation.... all kinds of things were blocked by admins. Some news servers were permissive and some were restrictive. Servers that were excessively permissive became hubs of spam, and thereby risked losing their relationships with other servers because other admins got too annoyed having to deal with it. And servers that were excessively restrictive had a hard time keeping users because you couldn't really participate properly if unable to see a lot of groups and not seeing a lot of the traffic, plus your messages would not propagate for others to see. So it was a balancing act.

For the most part this is an analogy that isn't helpful for a lot of people.. But maybe on SDF there are some who can recall those days. I do not think the concept of blocking servers breaks the concept of the fediverse at all.

(I am still undecided on my opinion on the question but I think it is a legitimate possibility.)

It's a work-to-rule. What people thought might happen is that reddit would decide it wasn't worth fighting over and back down.

With the information available the outset, and in the context of limited organization of those who wished to fight back, I don't think it was unreasonable.