Let me try to explain a bit better.

Let's take an instance called Instance A. Instance A is currently on the fediverse, which we'll say is pretty evenly distributed. No instance has a large enough portion of users whereby others would have problems with activity loss if they defederated, which is good. If any instance starts doing things that Instance A doesn't agree with, they can defederate, and less activity won't be much of a concern with defederating from that single instance.

But now, let's take Instance B. Instance B is planning to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse, and when it does so, it will control 80% of the activity. In other words, it has as much activity as the rest of the fediverse combined.

However, Instance B isn't particularly trustworthy. They don't value the open web like the rest of the fediverse does, their moderation is extremely poor, and they haven't cared for general well being in the past if it meant raising profits.

Here, Instance A and instances like it have two options: defederate immediately, or wait and see.

• If it defederates immediately, Instance A will see some users move to other parts of the fediverse because they're excited about the 5x increase in activity from Instance B. They probably won't go to Instance B now, but maybe Instance C or D. However, a lot of people will be fine. After all, activity is staying the way it is, and Instance B is untrustworthy anyway.
• If it waits and sees, this allows people on Instance A to enjoy and get used to the 5x increase in activity. Not bad so far.

However, let's say Instance B starts having moderation issues (e.g., widespread hate speech and more-than-usual spam) as everyone reasonably predicted. Instance A now wants to defederate.

• If it defederated before, no problem! Nothing needs to be done.
• If it didn't and wants to start defederation now, good luck. Now, everyone on Instance A has gotten used to the 5x activity on Instance B, and you're going to have an extremely difficult time convincing them to cut the activity they see and the users they follow by 80%. Way more people will leave Instance A if it defederates now than if it had just defederated early on.

In other words, if people on Instance A come to rely on Instance B for the activity they're used to, way more people will join the camp of "I'm leaving if you defederate with Instance B" then if Instance A just defederated from the get-go.

Let's take another example. Instance B wants to try to grab a bunch of users, so after some time, they stop federating at all.

• If Instance A defederated, the people there are fine. They never saw stuff from Instance B anyway.
• If Instance A didn't defederate, then 80% of the content that people are used to will suddenly be gone. Most of the accounts they follow will be disconnected, and activity will fall a ton. These users on Instance A will have two options: stay, with a horrendous drop in activity and no posts from the accounts they're most interested in; or just go to Instance B.
  In either case, Instance B will be fine. Most interaction was between Instance B users, so this won't be that much of a deal. But for users on other instances that are used to seeing stuff from B, it'd be catastrophic.

In short, defederating immediately has much smaller consequences than trying to defederate when whoever you want to defederate from controls most of the activity that your users see.

It's just a fancy name for "Dakota[citation needed]".

The issue is that this does effect Kbin because Kbin is a microblogging platform. It's also a thread aggregator, but it has microblog functionality that some people do actually use. Should we not defederate, stuff from Threads will flood the microblogs of Kbin. If your home page is set to use the All Content feed (like mine is), you'll see microblogs from Threads there. This doesn't have as much of an effect as it does on a purely microblogging-focused platform like Mastodon, but it does still affect a big way that Kbin is used.

100%. Additionally, there's a difference in magnitude between lemmy.world and Threads. While it's obviously not great that so many of the large communities are on lemmy.world, Threads would have a vast majority of the fediverse's microblog content. If Meta leaves the fediverse later on, people outside of Threads will suddenly lose almost all of the activity their used to and will likely move over to Threads. And Meta, being a profit-driven company, has all the incentive in the world to do this given that it would pull tons of users from competing platforms like Mastodon.

These corporations have shown time and time again that profit is their priority, and that profit explicitly goes against our own interests. You're not going to see Zuckerberg asking people to keep things balanced by joining other instances. He'd love to pull users from Mastodon, Firefish, and Kbin over to Threads, and it's easily doable if he's welcomed with open arms like big instances across the fediverse are doing right now.

… why? They just seem like a Lemmy instance for sports. Who are these people you have issue with? What are they posting that's so bad? Why do these few people justify what's essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation?

At press time, [the candidate] was attacked as too radical.

I'd change a single bag of Cape Cod party-sized sea salt potato chips so that it would be at my current location.

7 founding fathers seems like a rather arbitrary number — at least not one I've heard of and definitely a number you could argue — so I wouldn't put that as symbolism on the flag. Also not a huge fan of the arrangement of the stars. They don't fill the width of the blue field, and the 13 stars feel oddly small. I definitely agree that the U.S. flag could be simplified, but this isn't it imo.

I guess it's not the worst thing in the world, but who exactly did they think would prefer this? The logo it had was great — no need to change it.

At this point, I'm certain that platforms like Reddit and Discord just undergo random UI changes to keep the UI designers actually doing something.

Those are definitely important factors, especially distinctiveness at small size and at a distance. There are lots of red, white, and blue tricolors that only differ in some small, complicated symbol, making them difficult to distinguish even up close, much less from afar.

In 1532, the geographer Jacob Ziegler of Bavaria proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.

lol, that's dumb

This description was contradicted by natural historian Ole Worm, …

well duh, of course people thought that was stupi—

… who accepted that lemmings could fall out of the sky, but claimed that they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation.

oh

Unfortunately don't have OP; if I did, I would've just done /kill @e[type=cow].

As for mods, should I use Forge, Fabric, or Quilt?