This might be a good idea, at least until Ernest gets back. To my knowledge, he's the only instance admin, so as long as he's inactive, the spammers won't get dealt with (especially on magazines he moderates, like /m/tech).

Ideally, there could be another admin or two to deal with this stuff when he's not available, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Given that we're so small at the moment, why should a post need an upvote to be at all visible on the default sort? It can the only post of the past two weeks, but if there's no upvote, it doesn't get seen. It's very impractical.

And even if we go with this logic, why should the criterion for a post being seen be whether OP remembers to upvote their own post? It doesn't make sense. If you think that posts should only be seen if someone opts to go through new and give it an upvote (because otherwise it's not a "hot" post), OP shouldn't be able to do that.

Right now, we have a system where a major factor in post visibility is, "Did OP remember to click the upvote button?" It's just not beneficial.

Symbolism:

• The pine tree in the middle is taken from Maine's ensign and is a prominent symbol of Maine.
• The pine green stripe represents Maine's forest.
• The star in the top left is taken from Maine's old flag and represents the North Star, which itself symbolizes Maine's motto, "Dirigo" (meaning "I lead").
• The buff is taken from Maine's old flag.
• The red symbolizes the state's presence in New England.

EDIT: Fixed an error.

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.

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.

This is one of my designs that I'm really happy with, probably just because I feel the colors go together really well while being arranged in a very distinct manner. I don't remember what I had in mind symbolism-wise when I made this flag, but here are my guesses:

• The pine is a prominent symbol of New England.
• The triangular arrangement of the colors represents New Hampshire's nickname, the White Mountain State. You can even view the white and yellow triangles as a white, shaded mountain.
• The white & red allude to England's flag (more New England symbolism).
• The blue & yellow were probably taken from the original flag using symbolism from the seal, with the blue evoking the water from the harbor and the yellow representing granite (New England also being called the Granite State).

I think if most people genuinely liked these features, you'd see people say that more when they're being discussed. What's more likely (and what I see way more often) is the second thing you mentioned: that most people don't really care and just go on with life. But if most users don't care, it again begs the question of why waste time making these changes at all. It seems like it's just to keep the UI design team busy more than anything.

Upvotes are called favorites on Kbin, so the Favorites feed is stuff you've upvoted.

After I finished all of my U.S. state flag redesigns, I decided to take a stab at designing new flags for the territories! Here's the symbolism:

American Samoa

• The triangular pattern is taken from the existing flag, just flipped to be more prominent when waving.
• The red, white, and blue symbolize American Samoa's link to the United States.
• The color arrangement—a field of red with a blue shape on the left and white symbols within the blue—is similar to that of the Samoan flag.
• The war club and fly-whisk are symbols of Samoan leaders.

Guam

• The blue field stands for the vast ocean surrounding Guam.
• The red symbolizes the violent history of the island.
• The two shapes are meant to resemble a slingstone and a sinahi necklace, both Chamorro symbols.
• Yellow is used to represent the hope of a prosperous future and so that the center of the flag resembles islands in the sea.

Northern Mariana Islands

• The blue once again represents the ocean.
• The white slopes on the sides of the flag evoke the Mariana Trench, which lies near the Mariana Islands.
• The latte stone in the center of the flag is a Chamorro symbol.
• There are 14 stars for the 14 islands in the territory. The red and pink resemble that of the original flag's wreath, a symbol of the Carolinians.

Puerto Rico

• The white stripes are now yellow to better symbolize Puerto Rico's Spanish history.
• The rest of the symbolism is the same.

U.S. Virgin Islands

• 'Murican colors represent 'Murica.
• The Nordic cross alludes to the islands' former status as a Danish colony.
• There are 3 stars for the 3 main islands in the territory.

Well, looks like I'll just stick to using Invidious.

To repeat, they haven't really given themselves new ability to do much of anything. These guidelines have existed for a while, only that now they've been reworded and clarified a bit. They've had in their guidelines for at least 3 years that servers you're making money off of should be child-friendly. The same goes for the rules about constructed promotions. All of this freaking out is based on the worry that Mojang will suddenly start taking down maps and servers they haven't in the past under the exact same rules they've had for years when they have no reason to.