To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something.

Thanks to dumbass EU laws fussing over nonproblems like (check notes) targeted advertising. Really? I voluntarily give out information to an ad-supported service I don’t pay for, they turn around & use this to try to show me more relevant ads, and I’m supposed to pretend the internet was ever private & shit my pants over this? While I can understand safeguards from identity theft, cookies aren’t that, I don’t understand how this concern ever blew up.

Before those laws, those cookie banners didn’t exist & I was happy not clicking them. I was under no illusion that online privacy exists with free services running on ad revenue that can track online activity and try to harvest voluntary information that’s mostly worthless to me. Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but some hypochondriacs had to stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about it. Do they think the world just runs on magic?

Do people still have to say unalive?

Censorship is goddamn stupid. They should just tag content & let people decide what to filter.

What is a guy with 3 wives supposed to look like?

Features

Nice things about PieFed:

• Written in a common programming language that many developers understand and which has a bright future ahead of it. Python, of course! This will enable more contributions from a wider range of people than if it was made with Erlang, Ruby, Rust or PHP, for example.
• Constructed in a simple and straightforward manner that new contributors can come to grips with quickly. No fancy algorithms, special design patterns, fragile build process, or front-end framework. Just Flask with sprinklings of vanilla JS and htmx.
• Keep third party dependencies to an absolute minimum, to make server administration easier. Python + database (PostgreSQL) and you’re good to go! Redis optional.
• Consume few resources, to make it cheap to run. Many examples of federated software are bloated Rube Goldberg machines that require hefty servers and serious server administration skills, making money a constant problem. PieFed instances will be small and nimble.
• Emphasise trust, safety and happiness, drawing inspiration from the Mastodon Covenant.
• Built to last using tried and true technology that will still work decades from now.

Differences between Lemmy and PieFed

• Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
• Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
• Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/pics@lemmy.world
• People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
• Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
• Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
• Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
• Voting is private.
• See also features for healthy communities.
• Each community has it’s own wiki.

Mastodon Covenant & “safe spaces” are overmoderated trash. Features for healthy communities consist of Reddity moderation tactics.

Heavy handed moderation is the main reason Reddit disgusts me, so no thanks, & fuck that shit.

Egyptians had cool, mystery animals no one can figure out to this day.

Like this?

That’s pretty good: could that go in the OP body or is editing not possible?

Not in the OP. For primarily text content, images of them are pretty pointless: there are links to source, quotes, etc.

That’s a pleasant idea: best ways on going about that?

Make them publishers or whatever is required to have it be a legal requirement, have them ban people who share false information.

The law doesn’t magically make open discussions not open. By design, social media is open.

If discussion from the public is closed, then it’s no longer social media.

ban people who share false information

Banning people doesn’t stop falsehoods. It’s a broken solution promoting a false assurance.

Authorities are still fallible & risk banning over unpopular/debatable expressions that may turn out true. There was unpopular dissent over covid lockdown policies in the US despite some dramatic differences with EU policies. Pro-palestinian protests get cracked down. Authorities are vulnerable to biases & swayed.

Moreover, when people can just share their falsehoods offline, attempting to ban them online is hard to justify.

If print media, through its decline, is being held legally responsible

Print media is a controlled medium that controls it writers & approves everything before printing. It has a prepared, coordinated message. They can & do print books full of falsehoods if they want.

Social media is open communication where anyone in the entire public can freely post anything before it is revoked. They aren’t claiming to spread the truth, merely to enable communication.

That it’s irresponsible to sell a false bill of goods: a company sincere about not giving a fuck & that merely puts out an advisory is more credible than one that entertains illusions that fact-checking all social media isn’t a foolish endeavor. We don’t get that in reality, so why should we pretend we can get that online? Ultimately, the burden & responsibility to work out the truth is & has always been with the individual, and it’s irresponsible to pretend we can sever or transfer that responsibility, especially in an open medium like the town square, social media, or general reality.

There’s also the intractable problem of settling the truth. Why should anyone trust a company or anyone to be arbiter of truth? Infallible authorities don’t exist & they are inevitably going to get this wrong & draw wild conclusions like that pro-palestinian protests are antisemitic & need to be censored. While they could merely place notes/comments of fallible, researched opinions, we already get that with discussions like in real life.

Social media isn’t a controlled publication like an encyclopedia or news agency that chooses its writers & staff. It’s a communication platform open to the public.

Instead of promoting a false sense of confidence that lowers people’s guard with assurances no one can deliver, it’s better to cut the pretense, admit there is no real solution, and remind everyone the obvious—unreliable information from anyone is untrustworthy, so they need to grow up, verify their information, and keep their guard up.

Doesn’t reminding users not to be so gullible address that?

A problem is promoting unrealistic expectations that untrustworthy information is reliable because someone else will unerringly determine the truth & catch falsehoods from spreading. Claiming that ever made sense is bogus.

I’d rather “trust” a company that cuts the bullshit with notices like

The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

to remind the user that trusting noncredible information from unreliable sources is a ridiculous concept.

Oh noes: a private company that has no duty to challenge falsehoods has given up any pretense of giving a fuck.

I think we grasp cognitive meaning & emotive force in language. I think we also understand the concept of twisting words, have likely rolled our eyes witnessing it, and generally agree that a fair, reasonable person should resist it.

The claim is the word itself is derogatory. It’s an argument roughly of the form:

1. Someone mentioned female humans.
2. They used the noun “female”.
3. The noun “female” is derogatory.
4. Therefore, their statement (regardless of message) is derogatory.

These look like errors of reasoning: a persuasive definition (a definition biased in favor of a particular conclusion or point of view) and a type of straw man fallacy. While it can be used in a derogatory way, that’s not the general, conventional meaning.

Language isn’t always about logic.

Yet you attempt to defend the claim by a (specious) logic language doesn’t follow, either. Language does follow a standard (of sorts): convention. By that standard, the claim is false.

Natural language gains conventional meaning through collective choices of the language community. This general acceptance is reflected in responses of native speakers (not niche online opinions who don’t decide for the entire language community).

If (as reported) native speakers require frequent “correction” on a word’s meaning, that indicates the proposed meaning isn’t generally accepted. A longstanding definition (like “female” as a nonderogatory noun) holds more weight than a novel reinterpretation recognized by fewer.

If the “corrections” aren’t, then what are they? At best, a proposed language change—an attempt to push the idea that the noun “female” is derogatory and change the way allies speak.

Is it a good proposal?

Would defining the noun “female” as derogatory weaken sexist ideologies? Unlikely: extremists like Andrew Tate wouldn’t adjust their rhetoric because of a vocabulary. They wouldn’t need to adjust a single word.

Is it just? Justice requires targeting wrongdoers narrowly—discrediting problematic messages, condemning extremist ideologies, promoting deradicalization. Blanket condemnation based on a word punishes nonoffenders instead of actual wrongdoers. Antagonizing nonoffending parties alienates potential allies rather than foster change.

The result? A reductive purity test that challenges & penalizes allies instead of challenge wrongdoers. That is neither right nor beneficial.

Would making the noun “female” a dysphemism suggest to society that femaleness is wrong/taboo? That seems misguided.

Why that word? The assumption appears to be that usage by sexist extremists taints the word itself as if the word is to blame for their rhetoric. It’s roughly an argument of the form

1. Sexist extremists use the noun “female”.
2. Sexist extremists derogate female humans.
3. Therefore, the noun “female” is inherently derogatory: anyone who uses it derogates female humans.

First, is premise 1 true: do figures like Andrew Tate even use the noun “female” disproportionately? I’ve only seen it among socially awkward individuals: not the same crowd.

More crucially, this argument is invalid: it’s a genetic fallacy (guilt by association).

Thus, the proposal doesn’t advance (and may undermine) a good cause, is unjust, may rely on incorrect premises, and is poorly reasoned: it’s not good in any sense.

often done when discussing science or medical topics

or legal or technical or any context for impersonal abstraction. Such language has appeared in classified ads for apartment rentals: there’s even a movie about it. Not derogatory. Context matters.

It’s also used in situations where people are deliberately ‘othering’ people. Watch any police bodycam footage and you’ll see that cops frequently say “male/female” when discussing non-police individuals.

While US policing has serious issues, this claim seems forced: impersonal terms are standard in legal settings.

Assholes like Tate push a twist in this dynamic so that men are called men but women are called females

Recalling an earlier question: do they?

Though interesting if so, that alone doesn’t make the word in general derogatory. Nonderogatory instances are common (as you’ve identified). If a word requires a particular message to be derogatory, then the message (not the word) is responsible.

The use of a word in a derogatory message doesn’t make it derogatory. That would require an unattainable level of purity (ie, never appear in derogatory messages) for nonderogatory words.

Your argument really shows the people who “consider it derogatory” misattribute an entire rhetoric to a word.

Final thought: humans don’t need constant reassurance that they’re humans to know they aren’t being demeaned (unless they’re painfully insecure).

tl;dr The claim that noun “female” is derogatory is false according to conventional meaning established by the language’s community, corroborated by the frequent need to “correct” native speakers. Moreover, the claim doesn’t advance (and may undermine) a good cause, is unjust, may rely on incorrect premises, and is poorly reasoned.

it’s still derogatory

It logically isn’t. While you think that, and anyone spending their future with you should mind it, it doesn’t make it true.

Cool, another preachy argument that jumps to irrational conclusions. Because Ghibli?

It is a display of power: You as an artist, an animator, an illustrator, a writer, any creative person are powerless. We will take what we want and do what we want. Because we can.

Uh…we always could & did. Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs. No one owns an art style.

This is the idea of might makes right. The banner that every totalitarian and fascist government rallied under.

That’s the argument? Plagiarism & imitating art styles is fascism? Wow! The rest of the article is worse.

Please make the word fascism more meaningless.