Side thought, it’s really weird that the right refers to the left as liberals, but the left refers to right-wing “centrists” as liberals, so everybody shits on liberals.

I’m a very strong supporter of free speech. But free speech absolutism where you go out of your way to make all voices heard is not what free speech is about. It’s about the government not interfering. Just like people have a right to a gun, but Walmart has the right to kick you out for bringing one, rammy.site users have the right to say whatever they want, and other instances have the right to defederate.

If a teacher goes against the curriculum and teaches children that black people are all out to get them, I sure as hell hope the school would step in and stop or remove them.

That’s not a violation of free speech, but in your opinion above it would be.

Just looked at hexbear. I’d defederate them too. Though given they’re shitting all over liberals and saying how great Stalin was, I wouldn’t call them left wing either, other than liking communism. But maybe it counts as not right wing?

Go find me a left wing instance that spreads hateful disinformation and incites violence and I’ll ask to defederate with them too. Just because the right is the only side doing it doesn’t mean they’d be removed for being on the right.

If someone goes to jail because they murdered someone, it wasn’t because of their political preferences.

Free speech absolutism is harmful. By remaining federated with them, you’re participating in distributing their content and giving them a platform. People do have a choice of what they want to see, they can choose to be a part of another instance without morals. I would hope that a programming instance of all places would understand the consequences of propaganda given so many programmers work in data collection and targeted advertising. If you show an ad to 1000 people and one of them buys the product, the ad worked. It’s no different for disinformation campaigns.

It’s not like they’re just sharing differing opinions or saying awful shit, they’re taking things out of context or making things up (or posting articles that make things up) and it’s very easy to prove if you do a tiny bit of googling. One article listed off a bunch of climate predictions that were wrong along with sources to look credible. If you checked the sources though, they were all wrong. Some of the predictions were actually made by humans (but not the claimed academic institutions) while others were straight up made up.

I hope the admins make the right decision here. Protecting free speech doesn’t mean allowing people to say whatever they want on your platform. It means allowing them to say it on their platform without being fined or put in jail.

Did you try su -l?

Ubuntu. Package organization is annoying, versions are out of date, managing multiple versions isn’t consistent, and distro upgrades always have unintended consequences. Often ones that aren’t easy to figure out. Their reputation for being beginner friendly should have died around a decade ago.

Yes that’s how statistics work. If the statistics say 77% of people won’t die if they walk more than 4000 steps, but you see someone who walked 4000 steps who died, that means the study is fake. (Made up numbers to illustrate why anecdotes are useless unless claims are for 100%)

Second on kobo, sure the OS is proprietary, but it’s good enough that I forget. And as the previous comment said, you can install third party reader software. I like koreader, it pretty much replaces the entire UI of the device