People were complaining about .ml long before I thought it was justified, but I looked again recently and yeah, maybe. This instance doesn’t federate with it so I don’t see it often. Based on my quick impressions the other day it’s gotten worse. Not that it’s an “echo chamber” and I don’t mind hanging out with communists, but there’s too much low-quality noise.

Personally I wouldn’t block the whole server if it were up to me. There are still good people there. Just be quick to block the people and posts you really object to.

Protecting children from accidentally seeing anything slightly sexy is naturally the top priority. That’s what is harmful to minors. We better all stick to legally safe things like racism-based disinformation.

… but yeah, the designers of mastodon deliberately chose to avoid posts any longer than very short.

These days it seems like most things getting called “woke DEI crap” are totally in line with the norms of society, but someone wants to change that.

Sure you could ban VPNs — just as easily as you could ban newspapers.

Sure it sucks as a currency, but it if you’re the only town doing it then it might work okay as a tourist attraction to draw in any remaining wealthy bitcoin enthusiasts.

A car is pretty much the last thing you’d want to have a network connection. I’d sooner hook up my refrigerator and let it send analytics data to Frigidaire.

They don’t even name the offending websites. Cowards. It’s not ones I’d ever heard of it turns out: “websites such as crazyporn.xxx, hoes.tube, and love4porn.com”. Mashable doing a better job than the BBC, linking directly to Ofcom as well — though it seems I’m not allowed to see the Ofcom page due to their cloudflare settings.

misogyny is woven into the fabric of our institutions and stitched into every aspect of modern life

… so clearly, the way to deal with it is to create a vast new system of censorship for the Internet. It can hardly fail to solve the problem.

As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what’s needed. People seem to hate it because it’s slightly different than discord, but anything that isn’t discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it’s not as bad as fucking discord.

I don’t know, you’re probably more likely to find Akkoma instances these days. It’s pretty similar.

How in the hell is this the same federation of TNG, Voyager and DS9?

Clearly it isn’t. Why should it be? It’s the far future. Giant prison colony, shock collars, cruelty, punishment with no semblance of a fair trial on screen; clearly the Federation are the bad guys now, or at least adjacent to them. I was prepared to accept that premise. Could be interesting… but no, they immediately shove that concept under the carpet and pretend it doesn’t matter because this one person involved feels really bad about it. It was all just another convenient plot device with no meaning, and they moved right on without stopping to think about it. It’s utterly lazy writing, the kind where they go with whatever half-baked idea they come up with first whether or not it makes any sense for the characters and story. I say that with confidence because I’ve seen so much of it before. In this case the character they betrayed was literally Star Trek itself, but they’re doing it all the time in smaller ways.

Anyway I’m off to rewatch DS9 instead.

I don’t know. It just seems like one plausible explanation for what’s been produced. To me it has that feel to it.

Sure they were subject to all the constraints of commercial prime-time TV, but as that video discusses in some detail with respect to DS9, the writers still had freedom within that corporate framework to tell woke anticolonialist stories beyond the classic sci-fi adventure fare of TOS which itself often explored what was new ground for commercial television at the time. Under some other corporate masters it might’ve been possible for the new crew to find similar freedom today, if things had worked out differently — and if any of them have the ability to do it and the willingness to try. But Larry Ellison and the forces he’s standing in for seem far more alert to the subtleties of it than they used to be. There’s bigger money involved now and they’re keeping it on a tighter leash.

For a more serious critique of new Trek that you might find more interesting than the angry tweets you refer to, consider this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB5DroolqFU

It is not, so far as I know, an “extra network.” It’s one of many types of instance on the fediverse. Many of them have features that do not perfectly interoperate with others. The more popular ones eventually get to be widely supported as things evolve. Mastodon is not the standard, it’s just one among many.

Also, you’re a lemmy user. It’s one of the worst when it comes to interoperating smoothly with the rest of the network.

Where’s the “4chan” one?

The only reason AI is so dangerous is that many humans completely lose their minds when they hear about it.

Contributing to stupid fucking thread derailments about inconsequential points of netiquette as we have both done here is of course another fine tradition that has been around since the early days of the net. But you know, it’s not like there was a hell of a lot of other discussion happening on this occasion. The original topic deserves a thousand times more attention than it gets.

I have never been so cowardly as to feel the need to use an alt when replying to my own comments.

Welcome to fedi where not everyone uses it in exactly the same way as you.