Schadrach

Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.

Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.

Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?

…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.

Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.

Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.

They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.

Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.

But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.

Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,

Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.

Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.

They don’t give a fuck if murderers and armed robbers get away with their shit.

They care if murderers and robbers get away with their shit, they don’t care if murderers and robbers get away with your shit. Important distinction.

Guarantee you she was hot relative to local environmental temperatures, especially compared to women with a current latitude below 60.

You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.

inconvenienced

“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.

false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations

In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.

The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.

How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?

One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).

How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).

Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.

SA is hard to get a conviction in.

Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well, there’s the problem! It’s only half off for his protection - nobody likes hair in their cuye.

I just set the tip to zero and put “Will tip cash” in the delivery instructions on the rare occasions I do something like DoorDash.

Unless I order from a.local Chinese place that will deliver. I tip them generously, basically giving the older Chinese guy who usually runs the deliveries an amount akin to what all the fees from DoorDash would have been because at least then it’s the restaurant getting the money.

While the effect of not having as much random porn on steam is kinda nice, the underlying reasons for this are fucking horrifying because it’s further proof that some giant american companies (visa, paypal, mastercard) are the global morality police.

They have been for decades. You just aren’t going to see news stories anywhere major when what’s being banned by the morality police is something like loli or zoo content, but stuff no one wants to publicly defend are targeted first to set precedent to justify anything else they might want to ban later.

See the H.L. Mencken quote about defending scoundrels.

The more money someone makes, the few drug tests they take.

The more money someone makes, it’s also the less likely they’re working a job where people can be seriously harmed or killed by the direct, immediate effects of their behavior on the job. Jim from Sales being on smack is less likely to cause injury or death in the short term than forklift driver Klaus being on smack.

It is. But the reality of those sites is that for a guy the vast majority of your messages will never be read. You are shouting at the void and hoping for the best. This does not incentivize taking the time and psychological investment to write thoughtful messages, because you will send comparatively few and the lack of response is harder to deal with when you’re more invested. It incentivizes sending the quickest messages that you care about the least to as many as possible. The guy didn’t send her a dick pic, he sent every woman in a 50 mile radius the same dick pic hoping that with enough sheer volume he’ll get a response.

It’s basically spam that wants to fuck you, because non-spam options don’t get you anywhere.

I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind also being able to tell it to start to preheat while I’m on my way home. Would save a chunk of time if I could literally walk in the door and throw the food in the oven without the extra wait for it to preheat which is usually long enough to be annoying but not long enough to do anything else.

Correct.

Since math is a language and is itself described by language, that folds all the natural sciences (as they are described by math) into social constructs as well, and since engineering is just applied science, engineering is a social construct. Which means that civil engineers assign whether or not a bridge will hold under a given load and conditions, as opposed to it being some properties of the bridge itself independent of the language being used to describe it that determine what loads and conditions it can successfully operate under? No?

Sex is the same way. Sex predates language. Sex predates humans. Sex predates the entirety of organisms we would classify under Kingdom Animalia. It predates any living thing complex enough to have a language. It exists independent of the language used to describe it. You can easily make the argument that’s not true for gender, because unlike sex it doesn’t exist outside the language and societal structures built around it.

is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain

By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases. Whether it’s FGM, “correcting” intersex kids (in cases where it’s not going to cause problems with things like urination), routine circumcision, etc.

they assign sex

I hate the use of the word assign, but it doesn’t fit with what doctors are doing. Sex is a biological rather than social construct. They’re looking at how you are, and trying to identify what your reproductive organs are. It’s like saying a doctor assigns you a medical condition rather than diagnosing a condition that is already present.