There are a lot of people on the Internet; a nonzero number of them are frothing assholes; and frothing assholes are quite capable of running servers.

There are people goddamn sure that if you don’t accept their horse porn, that you must hate free speech.

widespread censorship is a slippery slope

I wouldn’t call blocking gore, nazis, and pedos “widespread”. For anyone who hasn’t heard the nazi bar story (source @IamRageSparkle on Twitter):

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

Going through the process of discovering I was trans and surrounding myself with trans people really made me re-examine how little work I’d done on issues of race, among other things. So many of the little passive aggressive things I found myself getting annoyed at cis people doing, I also found myself doing to people of color. Nothing particularly awful, but definitely inconsiderate.

True, it doesn’t rhyme with “Nike”. It does cough through the tough bough, though

GOOD POST

Yeah, the fact that the user auth and permission models were intentionally left out of the W3C spec initially really ended up locking ActivityPub into particular dialects and patterns that are now proving problematic for scaling.

I’m not sure it’s 100% too late for a redesign, though. The committee is still active and the Fediverse could still theoretically grow by an order of magnitude or two. Does that seem likely right this minute? No, but sometimes that kind of vision is what an ecosystem needs.