President Biden’s comments at a fundraiser last night in #California referring to Xi Jinping as a dictator “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol and severely infringe on China’s political dignity,” says Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning. “It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition.”
Others have said this. More and more, I think it's true: the Homeowners Association (HOA) culture on the Fediverse is hurting it.
Except, people who tend to push an HOA agenda don't even tend to be "homeowners". They don't code. They don't run servers. Many of them are recent arrivals to the Fediverse.
I don't bring that up to say that anyone's more or less important because they code or admin or have been active for awhile. But surely, if you're going to be a gatekeeper, you should have something to qualify you as the self-appointed enforcer of the HOA.
Usually, these self-appointed gatekeepers have never made any investment in this community. Instead, the HOA are outright hurting this community by being unwelcoming jackasses.
Just to give an example, why has #BlackTwitter soured on #Mastodon? It's the HOA in action. And who's currently uttering death threats to server admins? It's the HOA. They are toxic, and everywhere they go, they spread toxicity.
The worst FUD about the Fediverse isn't even coming from the likes of Big Social or Bluesky or the Press. It's from the HOA.
Who's spreading fears about "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's the HOA. Who's creating uncertainty about whether ActivityPub can survive a corporation's use of it? Again, it's the HOA. And who believes that the Fediverse will die because something happened without their approval? It's the HOA every time.
The HOA has no authority here. The Fediverse has no board meetings, never mind a board of directors. Their decision making power is a complete delusion, a total fabrication of their collective imagination.
To be blunt, I'm done with entertaining the HOA's bluster, speciousness, and pretensions.
From here on out, at least on spaces I have tangible power, I'm gatekeeping the gatekeepers.
@atomicpoet every time someone tries to tell me what I can and cannot do with my account I block them. I think it’s the only option that will bring peace.
Sorry, I don't buy this BS. If so few Democrats want Biden to run in 2024, then where are all the candidates challenging him in the primaries? The GOP could fill a theater with all the people hoping to beat Donald Trump in the primaries, yet all we hear is how Trump is gonna be the nominee and everyone else is wasting their time.
I haven’t been on Twitter for a while, so I just took a look and JFC! What a sewer it’s become. An unbearable reeking sewer filled with the absolute dregs of humanity, all of them with blue badges, ranting and spewing hate speech in every conversation.
So now I'm being told that a few people on a instance with 1000s of users who complain that you don't use CW or alt-text the way they want can result in your being blocked for the entire instance, even when you've never received any notification of this.
Sort of like how you'd get arrested in fascist countries and never told why. Kafka would recognize this for sure.
I would assert that this makes #Mastodon even more of a toy than I thought it was, and utterly unreliable for much beyond trading photos of kitties. Leela the Siamese Snowshoe approves of kitty photos of course, but beyond that anyone depending on #Mastodon might charitably be called "misguided" at best, if my understanding of the situation is correct.
And I feel that the public needs to understand that they're buying into this sort of nonsense if they're looking at #Mastodon as an alternative to Elon's #Twitter hellscape.
@lauren you won’t be blocked by anyone but the person who is complaining. I don’t always remember to use alt-text and I haven’t been blocked by Mastodon. If someone blocked me because I didn’t use it then that’s up to them. I don’t worry about it
>Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a dangerous bill that would give virtually any health care provider (including insurance companies) the right to deny care.
I’ve moved to @mastodon.social I’ve been informed @home.social is going away. It migrated my followers but it didn’t follow accounts so I’m trying to take care of it #mastodon
