Running from one platform backed by people who supported Trump, right into another one. Gotta love controlled opposition and the illusion of choice.

Right. So, no software ever, then. Even if you have a license that grants you perpetual usage rights, that doesn’t extend to anyone else shouldering the responsibility of perpetual hosting.

Your right to use software does not give you the right to expect others to store your digital junk for you.

That sounds like such an incredibly toxic environment. That goes well beyond the kind of infantalization I initially thought, and is well into deeply controlling territory. You need support! Social support, and structural support. Do you have some? Friends? Support groups? People you can lean on, and trust to provide some kind of safety net?

That kind of abuse is scarring. I highly recommend grabing copies of books like The Body Keeps the Score and Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. There are audio books for each, which are really good, and they’re available as epubs if you’re ok with digital books. You should grab copies any way you safely can.

You deserve help and support. We all need it to grow up and survive. It can be hard to find, especially when we’re hurt and suffering the injuries of abuse. We will often find the wrong people, and find it very difficult to identify and trust the right ones. But there are people out there who will respect, love, and nurture you. If you haven’t found them yet, look for them, and don’t stop until you find them.

They will change your life, and in ways you will never imagine. I promise you.

A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

It was major human infrastructure failure.

And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.

Inviting further genocide is not punishing him for the genocide. He didn’t play the strong man and step on a country America went and deeply intertwined itself in. So, instead, y’all held your smug, self-satisfied, fart sniffing noses high and let someonw who has championed the genocide take the reigns once more because yoh wrongly believe not touching the switch gets you out of the trolly problem.

Sorry, but as someone who’s almost certainly autistic, WTF is this about not letting you shower? That’s not an issue of diagnosis - whether misidentified or otherwise.

ASD is a social disability, and it’s one with a huge array of differences from the norm, both in type and in magnitude.

Your parent infantalized you. That’s not because of your neurotype – whatever it may or may not be – but because she projected meaning onto the label you were given.

That’s fucked up. I’m so sorry you were treated that way.

Uh, probably the default web interface. And Masto servers still lack quite a bit of functionality found on other fedi services.

That is not moderation. Moderation involves removing bad actors from the site, not underground black lists that let you pretend the Nazis aren’t living next door.

Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?

There’s no way to fight them on platforms where they are welcomed by the platform itself. Bluesky doesn’t want to moderate its platform, so there is no fighting the Nazis there.

And we can do this all over again in a couple of years thanks to BlueSky’s refusal to moderte its service, all because internet users refuse to thi:k abput how the internet works, and peoples addictions to being told what to read.

Doesn’t matter who the tax is levied against. All costs will be passed on to the buyer. They should be familiar with this idea. It’s the Republican’s key talking point against business taxes.

The thing is, we’ve seen what the working class wants: Not concrete policy that will help them, but to have their feelings of struggle, outrage, and anger acknowledged and reflected back to them.

The Democrats could have radical pro-worker, pro-working-class reforms in their policy platform, but if what they’re broadcasting is “things are great” energy, or “there are bigger fish to fry” energy, then they’re going to get ignored.

The Democrat’s talking points have focused on the health of American institutions. That’s the thing they’ve repeatedly signalled is most important to them.

It’s not what’s most important to most households. It’s actually pretty far removed from the top of their lists of concerns.

She would have won primaries this time around, though. While conservatives primarily believe in the “right people for the job” (where “right people” here is defined by the social hierarchy), liberals believe in the “right way to do things”. And the “right way” here would have been to give the VP her free pass at the general election.

But it’s so clear that this campaign was run badly, too. They had all of the momentum coming out of the summer, and it just evaporated in September. You could feel it just as surely as you could feel the seasons change. It’s still blowing my mind how they managed to drown themselves.

Something something accusation something something confession. Someone should probably keep an eye on this one.

There will be a branch of government telling them what to do. It will just be the courts, as they’re sued into oblivion by IP rights holders.

Well, who’s going to hold them responsible, really?

Heaven forbid someone point out the reasons things suck and the ways we could do thibgs different, even if you know no one’s going to change.

Better to just shrug everything off and tell folks “that’s life, get used to it”, right? That does a lot of good!

I would warrant caution and nuance when considering the effect of IdPol on these things. It’s a term that’s been abused and bastardized to high heaven, and it’s a concept that the right has made ample, productive (for them) use of.

The politics of whiteness, the politics of masculinity, the politics of white masculinity, the politics of Christian conservatism, the politics of white nationalism, of Christian nationalism, of white-Christian nationalism, etc., are all IdPol. These are identity groups that the right has very successfully leaned on and groomed.

If you actually look at the Democrats, the Liberals, or even the NDP, what Identity Politics do they actually spout? What do they say that’s such a turn off, with respect to IdPol? It’s very little. Instead, what you actually see is them focusing on issues that matter to women, immigrants, and people of colour, but not to the exclusion of others.

But the right has used the fact that they speak of non-white, non-male, non-Christians at all and used it to reinforce the Identity Politics of the blue collar voter.

The aggrivated teenage sitting at the dinner table whining at you about how racist and imperialist the country is is not engaging in IdPol. They’re engaging in the process of coming to terms with the fact that the world is not how it has been portrayed to them. But the rural Canadian or American voting against their interest because the party that is going to fuck them or their community over the most has done the work to sure up their identity as white, rural, and working class.

Their politics and support follows their identity, not their interests or policy preferences.

That is Identity Politics. And you’re right, it’s toxic.

It’s just not what you were using the word to mean.

She’s a Canadiam citizen, but born in the Philippines and ethnically Philippino. In case you were suggesting she was First Nations, Inuit, or Metis.