This was an absolutely wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing

No, I was pointing out that it's dropped significantly for Democrats too, and the overall point is that we can't rely on society as a whole to do/believe what's right and protect us.

Sealed means the back plate is glued on whereas the development version lets you remove the back plate with screws. I got the sealed version because it's more water resistant and I've been nasty habit of annihilating my electronics with water but honestly I'd recommend getting the dev version if you want

Yeah I know, I don't think them being tankies is really a problem for Lemmy as a whole. I was just annoyed that all they had to say is "no we aren't tankies" and people just took them at their word lol

I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands to just have a single model for all countries, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we'll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks "sideloading" when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you're outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it's hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse

Users should not be left to "fend for themselves" against abuse/hate/racism having a platform.

This is precisely the point I've been trying to make elsewhere in the thread. Maybe some people want total individual freedom/responsibility to block or not, but most of us want to find an instance community that will protect us and serve our interests by dealing with that for us, so we don't have to go through that mental health damage constantly.

By "ban" they mean defederate from. They're not banning an instance from the Fediverse, the instance that's defederating from the other one is just choosing not to interact with or have to see them anymore. So your rhetoric here is misapplied, because one instance defederating from another isn't silencing the latter for anyone else but the instance that made that choice. It's not analogous to restricting freedom of information or personal freedom at all, on fact it's precisely an exercise of personal freedom: freedom of association! It's more equivalent to just leaving a club and never coming back or hanging out around them anymore. Yes, it's done on the whole instance's behalf, so it effects more than just one person, but thats why random instance members can't defederate an instance they don't run from another instance, there's a decision procedure to make sure it represents the wishes of the instance as a whole.

Yup, that's kind of my plan

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven't been back there once since. We need more people doing this.

You say "thoroughly debunked" but this is what your article says:

It’s true that, building on earlier initiatives, China’s State Council published a road map in 2014 to establish a far-reaching “social credit” system by 2020. The concept of social credit (shehui xinyong) is not defined in the increasing array of national documents governing the system, but its essence is compliance with legally prescribed social and economic obligations and performing contractual commitments. Composed of a patchwork of diverse information collection and publicity systems established by various state authorities at different levels of government, the system’s main goal is to improve governance and market order in a country still beset by rampant fraud and counterfeiting.

Under the system, government agencies compile and share across departments, regions, and sectors, and with the public, data on compliance with specified industry or sectoral laws, regulations, and agreements by individuals, companies, social organizations, government departments, and the judiciary. Serious offenders may be placed on blacklists published on an integrated national platform called Credit China and subjected to a range of government-imposed inconveniences and exclusions. These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.

These punishments are intended to incentivize legal and regulatory compliance under the often-repeated slogan of “whoever violates the rules somewhere shall be restricted everywhere.” Conversely, “red lists” of the trustworthy are also published and accessed nationally through Credit China.

In other words, there isn't literally a singular social credit score for everyone in China, but the government does indeed collect vast amounts of surveillance information about your compliance with its draconian laws and obligations from a wide range of agencies and compile that into a list of services you should be blocked from and so on. So it "doesn't exist" in a very narrow literal sense, but definitely does practically speaking. This is hairsplitting technicalities to get away from reality.