At the moment, you have to create separate accounts for each service. It may be theoretically possible to distinguish account hosting from service provision, but at the moment, nearly all accounts are hosted by the same software that provides the service (e.g. pixelfed, peertube, kbin), and no service that I know of allows you to authenticate from a different service.

Identity isn’t federated. You can access other instances from your home instance. Just search for the community you want from your home instance, using the [email protected] syntax, e.g. !games[email protected]

https://writefreely.org/ federates via ActivityPub. Last I checked, it was send only — meaning, your posts will federate to other AP services, but you can’t receive messages or otherwise interact with accounts on other services. https://write.as might have more features in that regard.

One workaround is that you can set posts to include a signature with another fediverse handle, like a Mastodon account. Then, when people reply to your blog posts, your microblogging account will get a notification, and you can reply from there.

Mastodon splits the difference, giving individual accounts a number of tools to mute or block content or accounts, but also providing instance-wide tools to admins and moderators. Lemmy and Kbin are several years newer than Mastodon, so I assume that they’ll eventually catch up in terms of moderation tools.

“With certain exceptions” = A blanket ban, except for anything that isn’t the thing I’m trying to single out.

It can make sense to have duplicate communities on multiple instances in some situations. For example, if instance A and instance B both have Technology communities, but instance A is defederated from instance C, then that redundancy is valuable to instance C.

There are also ways to reduce redundancy — for example, different rulesets on instance A and B could result in different content in their respective Technology communities. And the questions that show up on each are bound to diverge in some ways.

Ultimately, though, my hope is that admins on the post ranking flank of the fediverse starting looking for more ways to distinguish their instances from one another. Self-hosting presents a number of opportunities that weren’t really available on a siloed corporate platform like Reddit. There’s no reason, for example, that an admin couldn’t start up a Medical instance, and subdivide it into much more topical communities/magazines than you’d find on a “generalistic” instance, e.g. Neurology, Cardiovascular, Podiatry, and so on.

(Just as an aside, Beehaw is a Lemmy instance, so it’s not really distinct from Lemmy in the same way that Kbin is distinct from Lemmy.)

My understanding is that some tech companies overcompensate, not because they’re afraid of running afoul of EU regulation, but as a means of pushing back against EU regulation that threatens to undermine their profits. That’s often the play when companies like Facebook warn that they’ll have to stop offering news in EU countries if a particular regulation passes. I have no doubt that regulation has constricted Google results in some ways (Right to Be Forgotten, for example), but I wonder if part of the disparity isn’t voluntary on Google’s part, as a means of applying political pressure in a system that’s less amenable to direct political lobbying than the US.

The standard fediverse method for dealing with instances that have toxic or egregiously permissive moderators is to defederate from them. The best thing Beehaw can do along those lines is to have clear, comprehensive guidelines about defederation; enforce them consistently; and be ready to update them when unforeseen variations arise.

It was. But dissemination wasn’t one of the charges in the Florida indictment, which suggests that they’re either not going to charge him with dissemination, or they’re holding off on those charges for now.

I imagine that having the other parties testify about what he showed them, couple with the audio, would suffice to establish dissemination. It’s not clear to me that he would even have to show them. If the audio has him revealing info from those documents, such as the number of troops called for in the attack plan, that may be enough for a guilty charge.

I didn’t mean to imply that they’d be state charges. Federal charges have to have a venue, and venue is generally chosen based on where the crime took place. These would be in a different venue because the crime arguably took place in New Jersey rather than Florida.

I’ll add, one thing that the admins of lemmy.ml and lemmy.world should think about ahead of June 30th is whether its healthy — for the network, their instances, and/or their mod teams — for two instances to host the majority of accounts on the service. Personally, I suspect that a broader distribution is probably better for everyone, and if they agree on that point, then one thing they work out in the meantime is a plan for how to limit new sign-ups and the best way to direct them out to other instances.

That data migration item might be a little cost prohibitive starting June 30th.

As for feature enhancement, I agree that Lemmy should be forward-looking in terms of what it needs in order to enhance the service, but I don’t know that catering to expectations set by Reddit is necessarily the best path. Reddit evolved to suit the needs of a centralized, profit-seeking service. Not all of the decisions they made along the way were necessarily optimal for users, conducive to strong communities, or even particular good for society as a whole, no matter how much the Reddit userbase has grown to tolerate or even demand them. And, ultimately, I don’t think it’s healthy for Lemmy to stake its future on its potential as a Reddit replacement. At some point, it needs to chart its own course. The devs should certainly learn from Reddit where they can, but Lemmy can be more than just where Redditors go when they’re pissed off at the admins.

Totally.

That’s a possibility. This case followed a delay where the Court voted to allow the now-rejected maps to be used in 2022. There’s a loose standard around whether an unfair map can be used. Realistically, we’re far out enough that every state should be able to redistrict in time for 2024. But a lot depends on the lower courts, because what will likely happen is that the states will cheerfully submit different maps that are just as imbalanced, and we’ll have to watch multiple rounds of court orders, new maps, appeals, and so fourth. In some cases, courts have given an ultimatum: Provide a fair map, or we’ll appoint an independent committee to provide one for you. So that’s one way out of the morass, it’s just a matter of whether or not the judges involved will go that route, and whether or not SCOTUS will defer to the lower courts when the appeal gets that high.

Intent is a pretty big question when it comes to cases like this. When Congress reauthorized the VRA in the 80s, the rewrote part of it to shift the focus to impact. In other words, districting changes that disadvantaged racial minorities has to be changed, even if the impact was unintentional. That’s part of why Republicans in South Carolina a few years back felt safe saying, “No, these districts were intended to disadvantage Democrats.” The law forbade redistricting to break up the voting block of a racial minority, but not for partisan gain. It just happened to be the case that the Democrats in the targeted district were mostly black.

Focusing on impact, rather than intent, helps prevent that sort of sleight of hand. And, as a result, some Republicans are deadset on shifting back to an intent-based standard, which is far more dificult to prove. Thomas is a notorious opponent of the impact standard—presumably because he believes that structural remedies to racism are just as bad for Black Americans as unmitigated racism. A stance that starts to seem pretty tortured in light of revelations about his relationship to Harlan Crow.

One common mistake is to think that their reasoning aligns closely with the politics of their parties. Gorsuch, for example, is a conservative, but he’ll often come down on the side of Native American rights because their position relative to the government is grounded in contracts and treaties, and he’s a hawk when it comes to preserving the right of contract. Once you understand that bias in his thinking, it makes sense as a conservative point of view, but it also means that he sometimes rules in favor of plaintiffs that we’d associate with the liberal side of a case.

Part of what’s so flummoxing about Allen v. Milligan is that most of us thought we had Roberts pegged as the anti-VRA guy. He opposed it in the Reagan administration, helped tear down pre-clearance, and has consistently ruled against it. So either something here has recalibrated his position, even if only temporarily, or there’s a nuance to position that hasn’t really stood out in previous cases.

And Kavanaugh, who knows? I don’t have a clear sense of his ideological commitments. Maybe he has none.

Was it a box full of classified documents?

The argument that Trump is being unfairly singled out for conduct of which every president or presidential candidate is guilty has a long pedigree. I remember talking to my dad about Nixon ages ago. He knew Nixon was guilty, but he grew up in a region of the nation where people had largely supported Nixon, and were reluctant to face up to the fact that they had backed an especially corrupt candidate. My dad paraphrased their attitude as, “He didn’t do anything that all those other politicians don’t also do.”

At a certain point, “All politicians are the same” is just a justification for voting transactionally: You put up with a corrosive level of corruption in return for the handful of policies that matter most to you.

That’s another service that’s not as quick or stable as it used to be. l