epicspongee [they/them or he/him] @ epicspongee @midwest.social

Sponge. But epic.

---

Read more

Posts

18

Comments

35

Joined

2 yr. ago

@seahorse@midwest.social how do you use these? Struggling to figure out how to do this.

Please link a source. I haven’t been able to find anything about this.

I live in Chicago lmao. I take the red line regularly. I go allllllllllllllll around the city and have never once had a problem here. The only reason why you hear about crime or shootings as much as you do in the news is 1) because it's already been sensationalized, and that sets the pattern, and 2) the entire Chicagoland area (including the suburbs, which get news stories blown up too) has a population of about 11.5 million people. Statistically for even a murder rate as low as Chicago's is (and it's not even in the top 20 most violent cities in the country), shit's just going to happen.

Since she was being sarcastic it means that she is trying to say that Obama wasn't bad (because that's how sarcasm works).

I mean… no? Sarcasm works in multiple ways lol. This is like a children’s picture book-level of understanding of sarcasm.

Yeah mine act like I get shot every time I walk out my front door

Obama’s biggest controversy was the mustard

That's not what she said lol. Sorry as a neurodivergent person I get that this tweet might be hard to read possibly, but she's being sarcastic here. Maybe in poor taste, but it's a joke. She's well-aware of the shit Obama's done and isn't a fan of him.

CPD's annual budget is $1.94 billion. There is absolutely not a 'lack of police' in the city.

I didn’t post it because her joke was funny lol

This is why I am bald lol. Just shave every day in the shower and boom problem solved. Also I hate how my hair feels when it’s hot out.

In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away.

Is this a fucking joke

Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic

My Mastodon server has just under 1.5k MAUs and has raised $4k so far this year. We've only been open for six months. This is not hard money to raise.

I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable.

I mean regardless of whether it's greed or not it's happening because they need to generate a profit period lol.

“Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”

David Harvey has been ringing the bell on this for at least a decade lol. Effectively capitalism runs out of profitable investments when you need continued YoY growth. Like finding trillions of new investment opportunities a year is just not realistic. So capitalists fund bullshit projects and flow their money into markets where the perceived value is significantly greater than any of the actual socially necessary value. And that distance grows greater over time, until people realize 'what the fuck are we funding' (like what happened with crypto, or the metaverse), and then that gap immediately shrinks and the unlucky capitalists lose their money. And that will continue happening.

To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.

No it's just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit's way of doing that.

Evergreen meme:

Idk, gonna be a very hot take, but I like my beliefs challenged and believe that everyone deserves a voice

Nazis had a voice once, and folks listened to them. And we ended up with the Holocaust.

Might be controversial but I don't believe that people who want to murder minorities deserve a voice. I feel like that's a pretty reasonable bar to set lol.

Blocking instances actually makes the lives of instance admins a lot easier. It not only reduces a whole chunk of problematic content for you to moderate, but it also encourages Nazis to go to the servers you block instead of yours. Nazis can't subscribe to the subs they want to on your server, and they get banned if they say Nazi shit, so they just leave and go to a Nazi server instead. It's like fly paper for Nazis lol.

As a Mastodon admin with a few thousand users, I rarely see Nazi content that I have to moderate. And that's because when I started I spent an enormous amount of time sifting through every server we federated with and blocking all of the Nazis and all the pedos and all the TERFs. And because I did that at the start, I only get maybe 10 reports a week, none of them are content that would traumatize me (almost always spam), and I also helped the servers that now use my list to do the same.

Blocking instances not only makes it easier for me to do my job, it encourages other admins to not tolerate these kinds of behaviors as well. Because if they don't moderate well, that attracts Nazis, and then we have to limit or ban them because we're volunteers. So everyone just ends up blocking the shittiest servers and moderates their user base well. It's a win/win for everyone.

Nazis are not entitled to access to minorities on my server. TERFs are not entitled to access to trans users on my server. Assholes are not entitled to have access to an audience on my server. There are tons of white supremacists or TERFs or other assholes hosting plenty of other servers where they can go and do that. But I don't want that on servers I host and my users don't want that on servers I host. If you truly believe free speech is such a big fucking deal, then you are welcome to leave and join one of those rotting servers as well. See how fun that is for you and how long it takes for you to come crawling back.