whofearsthenight

It really doesn’t matter if they have anyone left that knows anything about anything. All reports thus far is that anyone not giving the ol’ “aye captain” any time Elon says anything gets shitcanned. I’m sure there is someone there that probably went “but, sir…” before immediately getting shut down.

Now if you had to guess how often I remember that there is a keyboard shortcut that does this, but don’t remember what it is, and do remember that I can just press up 30-70 times…

Well, I have good news and I have bad news.

Bad news first - I think a lot of the reason this doesn’t exist on federated services is largely because those services are in their infancy and principled people or at least people with slightly more than lukewarm IQs are more likely to seek them out.

Good news - the capitalist nature of corporate social media means that at scale you have to tolerate a certain number of nazis and bigots. See also: the recall scene from Fight Club. The fediverse largely doesn’t have that problem. We don’t have to say “we have to keep this account on the network because they’re boosting the ad numbers” we can just fucking ban them.

In the short term for the fediverse, it’s a little security by obscurity. In the longer term, it’s really more of a moderation problem, but even there I’m optimistic. Over on reddit, there were/are a few subs where if you blocked every user subscribed, you’d lose no value even in other subs. instances are going to be similar, I bet.

I use DDG as my primary, and my general feeling is that I don’t mind some advertising to make money, but Google is objectively bad these days. At the time I started using DDG, Google was still probably the better choice in terms of search results. These days, DDG is competitive, but more importantly, I don’t have to scroll past half a page of ads masquerading as results.