I didn't really like the middle stanza, it's too blunt and banal somehow, I guess that's the point but it doesn't really land for me at all. "Think of the starving children" is such a cliché, "while men make decisions on who gets to live" isn't a great line to me.
And it is a shame because I really liked the first and last stanzas.
This:
The world is on fire and I'm choosing
between two kinds of soap.
is so much better. That is great. And the ending too.
I mean, I don't think they've done something this bad just yet but they also do hardcode a lot of things into the software, and some of the webpage blocks are apparently very tedious to take out if you want a politically neutral Piefed instance. They are very openly opposed to the leftists around here. Here is some recent stuff too.
There was also stuff like the implementation of flairs on Piefed deliberately declining to use ActivityPub endpoints, which made it an exclusive feature to entice users to switch instead of something Lemmy could create compatibility with, which felt kind of EEE-ey to me. Now that was years ago and I haven't kept up on development, they may have changed it around since then. I think flairs are coming in Lemmy 1.0, or something sort of like it.
And recently there was the whole vote rationing fiasco, which stemmed from some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how voting works on a place like this by Rimu, was idiotic from the start and ultimately drove PugJesus (an incredibly valuable and active poster in tons of niche communities) permanently off the platform after they didn't back down.
Getting upset because of the transitive property from a single mod's user handle on anarchist.nexus is not db0 "systematically sending death threats", though. Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary evidence.
Trusting the victims and healthy scepticism are always at odds with each other, but in this case AdmiralPatrick has already been caught in bad faith arguments before where others have had receipts and he had nothing.
It wouldn't entirely suprise me if some nutcase actually did send him some death threat, but in this instance I'm not going to just take his word for it.
I would hardly call you a deranged lunatic. In fact, I would probably call you "feminist sex history expert", because that's what I've tagged you as hahaha (possibly unnecessary clarification: it's a compliment).
As for the Tesseract mess, while I do of course agree that doxxing, death threats and hounding in the DMs is bad and should never happen to anyone, I feel like at this point I can't take these accusations from him at face value. He has already argued in bad faith before and come up short on receipts.
And yeah I agree that the biggest tragedy is that there is a place for a curated experience like what he was trying to create. It was just gone about in such a bad faith way, maliciously implemented and had a block list made by someone with deranged and probably outright homo- and transphobic views on what's acceptable.
And also, hijacking other people's PC's to DDOS db0 on the way out is like, an actual crime in quite a few places.
Like the other commenter said: while being empathetic as a default mindset is generally good, there comes a point where you need to look at the body of evidence.
Yes, nobody should be getting death threats. But - much like the supposed "toxicity" of some subs he blocked such as the apparently horrible WholesomeYuri - there comes a point where he is required to show some receipts. Because several of his accusers do have them.
Also: purposefully DDOSing a server as some kind of petty revenge is just disgraceful.
It's not disgraceful. It's criminal, at least in a substantial amount of places. It's not a petty lashing out, he did a crime here. Let's call it what it is.
I think Lemmy.zip has a policy to stay federated with as much of the Fediverse as they can, so that might be an option.
In general I tend to recommend smaller, either interest-specifc or local, language-specific instances first, though, as using those lets you actually utilise the /Local feed the way it's intended.
While a toxicity filter for normies as an onboarding tool is not the worst idea in the world, the implementation was. But even beyond that, the blocklist was so clearly going way above and beyond "sanding off the rough edges" and straight into just "I'm going to block everything I personally dislike". Wholesome Yuri is like, the opposite of toxic but that whole community was blocked. As was using "🥺👉👈".
Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature
Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.
But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.
Second it must be opt-in.
Third, it must clearly say somewhere that "this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences". There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.
And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more... well-balanced individual.
Yeah, I don't like that one bit tbh.