I never thought I would find myself living in Dickensian England.

That's how far democracy has gone down the drain, that even criticising cancel culture is 'brave'.

Take it to a witch-burning.

Let's make farting in public a crime.

People on Mastodon are complaining about people talking about twitter, and posting their complaints to the hashtag #twitter which is very odd, as they could filter it.

I expect there will be filters on Lemmy eventually.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jp5a77/google-a-search-company-has-made-its-internet-archive-impossible-to-search

I remember it filling groups with non-text posts which could not be read by Usenet clients, among other things.

I should think there are many people who think Google Groups is Usenet, and they have to register with google to post on there. Recently I think they have removed the option to view the source of an article.

Remember what Google Groups did to Usenet? We should be wary.

If it is software how do you know who has implemented it and whether the instance respects privacy?

If I am reading Google Translate's English translation of your post, am I reading human authored text or AI authored text?

I discovered google had recorded all the hashtags I had visited on mastodon. I thought I had turned off this recording, but there were additional categories which I think they have added since the last time I was there.

Of course the UK government and ISP record everything too, by URL, so that includes hashtags, even this post has a unique URL.