Except it seems like every time a major area ceases water fluoridation the caries immediately increases compared to nearby areas. Until we see some hard benefits from removing fluoride from water that exceeds the benefits of fluoridation there’s no point in giving in to the fearmongering of conspiracy theorists

What in the AI hell is that image?

1. One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.

For clarity’s sake, the views the mod expressed were:

• Calling criticism of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and transfer to Louisiana “yellow journalism” for using the phrase “disappeared”
• Defending the striking down of a school privacy policy that requires teachers get consent from LGBTQ+ kids before outing them to their parents
• Removing posts about surveillance of LGBTQ+ people in r/privacy for contradictory or unexplained reasons

3. The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.

Is all criticism now a “mob” just because they don’t want people with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views to have the power to censor others?

4. The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.

From what I saw, the admins actually said that they were fine with keeping him on the moderation team and the mod deleted their own accounts

6. Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.

Are they? The most I saw was that people were considering leaving because other instances were going to start blocking Fosstodon

What is with the concealing and downplaying of the mod’s views and then exaggerating the “outrage” of the “mob”? Yes the Fediverse can be drama-prone but most of the fanning of the flames seems to be coming from the people complaining about Fedi users genuine criticisms of the mods/admins on Fosstodon

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remove mod privileges for these kinds of views if you’re trying to run an inclusive space. There’s supported suspicion that they’ve used their mod powers to censor information on minorities already, just because they haven’t done it yet on this platform doesn’t mean you let them lie in wait to do it. Makes me worry that Fosstodon admins don’t see any issues keeping someone like that around

Would this get the same kind of backlash had the mod been kicked out for tankie views?

I’m sure they’re less interested about buying Chrome than they are about buying Chrome’s market share

1. Bluesky is more easily usable
2. More people they want to follow are on Bluesky

Instead of complaining we need to work on making Masto more welcoming to new users and amplifying the advantages it has over Bluesky

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

Just dragging this newspaper into the right wing muck at full speed now

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

“Market of ideas” but you’re only allowed to say what I like

I think there’s a few other issues with server selection

1. Longevity. How do you know that the server you are on will be there in 1, 5 or even 10 years? For larger servers like Mastodon.social you have a general idea that it will last as long as Masto itself, but others have very little guarantees on if you’ll log in and find your entire feed gone. It only takes

2. That brings me to my next point: migration is currently inadequate. Migrating accounts only redirects your following/followers lists and some account settings. All of the posts, reposts and content uploaded are left on the old server and potentially wiped out if it’s shut down. Professionals or anyone who wants a lasting online profile need to stick to big instances because they risk losing everything if their server can’t continue. I also feel like there should also be an emergency “export all” button the admins can press, so the server will email all users a copy of their data in case of shutdown. That way users who can’t export their data manually before the end date will have a copy of it. And this still doesn’t solve the issue of small servers shutting down out of nowhere and wiping out every user’s profile on there. If that happens to an average user they’re probably just going quit Masto outright

3. Defederation is a good idea to keep bad servers isolated from the community and let servers dictate how open they want to be. But there’s not a lot of indication of what servers have blocked/restricted the one you’re signing up for, other than going to another server and seeing if the admins have manually typed up a list of that they blocked/restricted. There’s also not a great way to see if the server you’re looking at is read-only and any posts you make aren’t being seen by users on the other server. Or that you’re looking at a server that has since defederated and will no longer update posts. Also (afaik, there’s not a ton of good explanations) but if you’re newly connecting to a server it will only federate new posts going forward and not previous posts. Which again messes things up for people who want to use it as a consistent timeline. Dropping users into random small/medium servers risks preventing them from seeing their friends posts or cutting them off from their friends entirely

4. You mention data privacy as a risk of large servers, but how is it any better on small servers? You have no idea if the user you’re handing your data over to is trustworthy or reliable or that the server they manage is secured. And how do you know that a large company won’t come in and offer them money to sell the server, and suddenly all your data is in the hands of spammers? And direct posts are not private. Plenty of people on Twt used their real names/emails/pictures. It’s not going to be viable to have every user create a burner email and never reveal any info, even in private messages without them deciding it’s not worth it. Alternatively, they have to verify the trustworthiness of every admin on a potential server, despite them likely only having a username and posts to work off of

I think there are bigger issues than “just choose a server, they’re all like email” that causes people to gravitate towards larger platforms. It’s not just connectivity and uptime, there are logistical issues that will impact users if Masto gains more mainstream adoption. I haven’t even touched on the threat of bad actors and spam which I don’t feel like the network is ready for yet

I still crave shooters but don’t seem to have the time for online multiplayer anymore. I want to try stuff like Ultrakill and Selaco nowadays

Does anyone really want another generic hero shooter though? It’s not like we’re at a loss for options

Card Crawl/Card Thief/Miracle Merchant are good puzzle-like games

C’mon dude, cartoon animals doesn’t cover the amount of suspiciously similar Palworld color schemes and proportions we’ve seen compared to Pokemon like Cobalion/Lilligant/etc

Migration on Mastodon is really not good enough to use it for switching accounts. Unless you just never post and only follow people

I can only assume that the issue is that they’re trying to reduce the number of calls to the original instance. If you’re just scrolling by, you only see the post that’s cached on your own server, and it doesn’t communicate with the original instance until you open the post. Making it so that every time some scrolls by a post it contacts the original instance sounds like it massively increases the amount of traffic to the original instance which goes against the idea of software that supports smaller, self or community hosted servers.

And then they’ll cancel anything they didn’t spam the front page with and blame it on low viewership

It was originally given away for free

Pixelfed is the federated alternative, not sure if it’s open source though

Boy this legally distinct gothic horror themed game that shares nothing in common with a popular Sony franchise sure looks like a fun time

Not so much as stopped feeling nostalgic for, but realizing that there weren’t as many great games available as I thought that haven’t had better successors or remakes. And for Nintendo consoles, non-Nintendo games that stand the test of time are difficult to find outside of a few franchises that usually have more modern versions on Switch.

We are just spoiled for choice these days when it comes to games, especially with indie games. And indies these days often have better UX than most mainstream games back then.

Aside from the fact that this is IGN, this amount of consolidation is really bad for the industry