Firefly7

The second wave of arrests was almost entirely students, because Columbia has been on lockdown and it’s been increasingly difficult for non-students to get in in the first place. The “outside agitators were at fault” narrative that Columbia is pushing is at odds with this.

Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you... edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website's UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you're browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia's content moderation problems, but it doesn't do much against that that wouldn't also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others' pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you'd have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you'd know that all the options were wikis that haven't been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki's admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don't know. I'm happy this exists. I think it's interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

This one made me laugh. Most I just find to be novel, silly, or interesting, but a fair few are pretty funny to me.

Stuff like “Unions aren’t guaranteed to give you a raise, or any other benefits,” “Unions just want you to join so you can pay dues to them (think about all the things you can buy with 1% of your income!),” “Unions get in the way of workers having a healthy relationship with management,” “Unions make things less efficient, so we may dip into unprofitability and have to close down the factory…” Employers also often hire “neutral third parties” to tell employees that unions can be good, or used to be good, but aren’t at [employer].

Joining a union is the sensible thing to do, but employers fighting tooth and nail and breaking every slap-on-the-wrist law on the books is also the sensible thing for them to do, so they do everything from anti-union pamphlets to one-on-one intimidation meetings to calling ICE on their pro-union immigrant workers

If this question is “Would you rather everyone be able to talk, or just people who are correct?” Then, uhm, correct according to who?

I prefer having a range of forums of different functions, from “Only my friends can speak” to “everyone, save for those who use speech to harass or intimidate, can speak” to “only the teacher can speak.” None of those fit neatly into either category here (even teachers are sometimes wrong).

Mx is common-ish among nonbinary people. Here’s a relevant poll regarding people’s usages of it: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2023-mx/

The pledge of allegiance, not the anthem. But yes, it was every day. Although, where I grew up, it was never enforced, and most kids didn’t stand or participate.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

If you’re looking for something arcadey and replayable, the Touhou series might be worth looking into. Great music, too.