To be fair he does have a lot of experience in the toxicity of social media. He's an expert in the field.

It's like if e-coli had some serious concerns about your choice of antibacterial spray. Worth noting the objection, possibly with a little smile, and buying a few more bottles.

Man, I really disagree with your stance but you're arguing in an annoyingly reasonable, balanced manner and doing legwork to produce evidence for your claim that invites people to re-evaluate their long held stance.

It's annoying because I like my long held stances. They're comfortable.

I'm a big fan of dark humour (as long as it isn't punching down and is kept in pretty well defined areas where it's unlikely to upset reasonable people who happen to be on the wrong side) and have read all your posts thinking 'sorry but if people can't joke, or express their frustration and fear by pretending they aren't powerless, that sounds like a recipe for frustration and repression', which is reasonable because all the examples are on my socio-political side.

And you've made it kinda obvious, without being aggressive, that if I only think it's ok because I happen to agree with them... It's maybe time to re-evaluate my threshold for when joking and letting off steam online crosses the threshold that I don't want to be part of that community any more.

So, full marks on 'how to convince people to change beliefs that they have an emotional connection to', because I've seen the argument a few times and it's never been remotely effective.

And I guess, the world needs less violent jokes and personal vendettas in general, even though it's clearly one side causing the actual problems. I can't keep criticising them without being critical of the people in my own spaces doing the same.

(Really sorry, just a few marks deducted because I do not feel overjoyed or enlightened. I'm mildly annoyed that I've been in the wrong and have to change, for no personal gain, and it'll take the fun out of a lot of the internet. I suspect at some point I'll realise I'm much happier without reading violent stuff etc, and be much more grateful. But for now it feels a little like finding out that one of my new hobbies is problematic)

Oh god, I didn't even look to see what changes they'd made to other articles.

Actually that should make things easier, there are processes for reporting repeated vandalism, and they're much more efficient than 'this person wrote one article badly'. I'll have a look.

I get your point, but the 'real crux of the matter ' is very much - what is the fediverse. That's what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.

Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.

Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can't be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers' rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.

Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It's horrific (source: I'm English). It's been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn't look like it's in the final stretch of being solved.

It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that's just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.

Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn't put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I'm glad someone did.

Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don't ever have to.

That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.

At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.

I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don't have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that 'yep, sorry, you can't operate here. Yes I know you're just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady'.

TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service

They did! The change log shows the main section of 'I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here's 600 words on how terrible the concept is', and also reassured me that I wasn't just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.

I'm bizarrely excited about it too. You can't thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I'll throw a vague 'thank you!' out into the world and try to pay it forward.

My next battle: figuring out why I can't edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn't think of 'just edit it anonymously'.

I feel like the corporate American need for exponential growth and for endless feeds of mindless scrollable content is, maybe, not what people are crying out for on the fediverse.

There are so, so many other platforms offering both. They got shit, because exponential growth and endless scrolling feeds only ever lead that way.

I'm happy with one little corner of the internet that doesn't always need to pump up its numbers month on month, year on year, and where I can scroll for a bit then get bored and go back to the real world.

In fact, I seem to recall an awful lot of people saying that's the only way to engage with the www and stay sane. Or at least, have a fighting chance.

Who on earth signed off on this name?

Is is targeting the (presumably few) people who want to leave WhatsApp and/ or Facebook messages but who have good feelings about platforms called 'X'? There are 25 other letters of the alphabet.

A Napoleon complex, as I understand it, is when a high achiever feels insecure due to a reasonably insignificant, but noticeable, flaw, and gets so bitter and defensive about it that it draws attention from their achievements to the flaw and their bitterness.

Eg, man rises to the top of his country, conquers others, spreads and empire that, for all its flaws, revolutionised global concepts and uptake of democracy, human rights etc. English critics mainly focus whether he's a few inches shorter than average.

Whereas Elon: did not do any of that, and the 'minor flaws' are his remarkable personal anti-magnetism.

It's absolutely unbelievable that the richest man in the world still can't get any friends, let alone partners, who can stick around longer than a year or so. He was brought up with the finest education money could buy and every opportunity, and has not managed to invent, discover, or excel at anything other than buying things.

Not only has he not conquered a multitude of countries or spread anything other than anger and personal dissatisfaction, he couldn't even rise to the top of his own country.

And, not being funny, his own country was not the stiffest competition in the field of 'really respectable, well liked, competent people'. White South Africans do not dominate the league tables of Cool Chill Folk Who Fairly Earned Their Worldwide Respect, and all he had to do was keep buying companies and collecting money and not being such a raging wanker as to be a threat to multiple countries' national security. That is such an achingly low bar, and I truly do not believe anyone except Musk could have failed to clear it.

TLDR: Napoleon ruled his country and many others, leaving a new global standard for law, human rights, freedom, and democracy (which is even more impressive considering he was a kinda imperialist knob).

Musk's talents are being astronomically rich, and against all odds, setting a new global standard for 'that white South African pro-apartheid guy who turned out to be unusually racist and anti-meritocracy'. How bad do you have to be before billions of people would recognise you from that description? The man was born on a golden throne and has managed to make a name as the most distasteful turd in the open sewer miles away.

Just so you know, this comment is visible on the internet for anyone to see, and has been for 2 years.

When they actually introduce all these fantastic new features, we will know who to blame for the idea.

I get your point but I don't think Russia recreating the first acts of WWII on a NATO country can be dismissed as a 'distraction' from many real world events short of actual official world war 3, or Putin being arrested or something.

There is also a strong argument that illegally invading a country is always quite a significant event, certainly to the people in that country.

Yeah, but most of us have this funny idea that war is a bad thing and we don't want to do it again.

I'm pretty sure there are enough 'pro-war, show those bad guys who's boss! We ain't no pussies' people to form a formidably large army, though, which seems like a win-win for everyone.

Those who want war can go ahead. Everyone else can continue what we've put so much effort into for the last 100 years or so. And all the 'big fan of war as long as it's happening to somebody else' people can choose to be very quiet, or shipped off to the front lines.

I suspect the internet would suddenly take a very pacifist turn.