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Gonna put the people whining about changing the date of Australia Day or complaining that calling it 'Invasion Day' is divisive and blaming modern Australians for what the first colonisers did, into the same black bin as the idiots who'll be demanding to know when 'White History Month' is next Wednesday.

If you don't get the point Indigenous Australians or Black Americans are trying to make, why don't you shut up and listen instead of flapping your gums?

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Stupid "my pronouns are" jokes in your bio?

Instablock.

If you don't take this stuff seriously, or understand why other people do, that's fine. Making fun of the people for whom putting pronouns in bios is important or helpful, is just being a dickhead for the hell of it.

People who debate creationists learned long ago that you just shouldn’t. When people who actually know their shit get down in the mud and “debate” with bad faith actors, it only helps the bad faith actors by making their fucked up ideas seem legitimate enough to warrant debate.

17019 People have now died of Covid-19 following last years national cabinets decision that we would have to live with the virus. By contrast only 2,239 deaths due to the virus were reported during the first two years of the pandemic.

People often cite confusion or uncertainties in choosing a Mastodon server or instance as a major hindrance in signing up.

Others push back and say it’s not hard, it’s easy, there’s nothing for you to worry about, more than 1.5 million accounts are active on the platform, just pick any server and you’re good to go. If you don’t like it, just change servers.

I’m sorry, that’s garbage. If there are people who say it’s daunting to sign up, then it’s daunting for them. Who are you to deny their experience and say it’s easy?

When I first signed up in 2017 I ended up on octodon.social because mastodon.social was swamped and closed. Choosing this instance was random. It was like jumping into a barren land with no guide and no map. No clue about local or federated timelines or where people I know were. I jumped right back out after a handful of posts.

However, it doesn’t have to be daunting. When you go to the mastodon website and check out the list of servers available, it tells you the name and a description of each server and a button to sign up, but nothing else. The information you get at the start is lacking.

You don’t know that instances can block or limit others or are blocked or limited by others. You don’t know that blocked servers means they’re invisible to you and you can’t interact with anyone whose accounts are hosted there, and vice versa.

You can’t see, let alone interact, with people in blocked servers. You try to follow someone and it’s a follow request, not immediate because you don’t realize their instance limits yours. And they don’t see your request because they don’t use the website. Annoying? Yeah, a bit.

It would help if servers let people know about character limits and server limits and suspensions, what they mean, who’s hosted where, what’s happening, population size, etc, all right at the start.

If they’re reluctant for whatever reason, it’s where tools like these come in:

Mastowatch
apps.apple.com/app/mastowatch/

Fedifinder
fedifinder.glitch.me

Debirdify
debirdify.pruvisto.org

Instances.Social
instances.social/

Some of these probably should be first party tools because of the lack of visibility as third party.

I belong to a support group for other parents of #trans kids. One of the parents just posted the obituary for their 16 year old on our group page.

This isn’t a game. It’s not idle or trendy. And it’s not up for debate. WE ARE FIGHTING FOR OUR CHILDREN’S LIVES. And we are fighting against an unending tidal wave of discrimination, misinformation, apathy, and bad faith punditry.

Please repost/like if you are someone in 2023 and still actively thinking about health risks related to airborne viruses in social places. I'd like to feel less lonely while still knowing that the pandemic is not over #CovidIsAirborne #CovidIsNotOver

So, does "sealioning" mean "dying from bird flu" now?

Great post by @mmasnick detailing what's at stake in the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments in the Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh cases. Shoutout to @LegalEagle@twitter.com for the excellent video as well!
#Section230 #ContentModeration
techdirt.com/2023/02/17/next-w

Wow, I was not expecting to be triggered into memories of being threatened by my mother to "wait until we get home" by a communal movie watch.

I can't abide anyone who equates criticism with hate, and I'm not going to stand being yelled at in a supposedly 'fun' environment for not reacting the correct way.

The best post @robynelyse has written on a devastating subject:

"The Problem With Police Reform Is That Police Already Know It's Bad To Beat People To Death"

wonkette.com/tyre-nichols-poli

Alcohol 

A woman at the grocery store asks if the beer I'm buying is a good brand and I'm like, listen, I don't know anything about beer, this one has a pretty picture of a boat on the bottle, why must you embarrass me so

I met this chicken yesterday and all I could think of was how much better Jurassic Park would have looked if they had represented even some of the therapod dinosaurs with feathers even a quarter as exciting as this. #chicken #dinosaur #plumage #JurassicPark

Lucy loves to sit in our bathroom sink. She has a food + a water bowl in the kitchen, but she’d much prefer to drink from the cup she has trained us to keep filled on the bathroom counter.

Thinking about how my neighborhood's NextDoor was full of ppl organizing a vigil in support of our city's police chief so I looked up what he did...he let a sergeant do a hit and run & a year later fire a gun inside an elevator??? lmao sfchronicle.com/bayarea/justin

Checking the veggie patch for late night slugs and… I’ve heard of tree frogs, but not lettuce frogs 🐸 #WildOz #VeggiePatch #Frog

I do not want to know anymore names, I do not want to know anymore strangers. I do not want to know your families or your friends, I do not want to know what you liked, I do not want to know what you were looking forward to. I wish I did not come to know your names Trayvon, Sandra, Breonna, Tamir, Mike, Rekia, Miriam, George, Keenan, Tyre. I wish you remained distant strangers because you were simply living your life.

I don't know if I'm late to the party for this. But the Tyre Nichols murder was a line-crossing event for me, and not just for the police.

I realize now that the police won't stop. The Republican Party won't stop. Big pharma, big corp, big oil won't stop until we fuckin end them.

Everyone who fights for a better world gets pummeled again and again by this shit. It never ends.

We can't act like Democratic moderates and just accept it... push band-aid solutions with flashy "see! we're doing something!" headlines.

This is war. These organizations, institutions and corporations that have been fuckin up our lives have gotten away with it for too long.

Time to end this. Time to end them.

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