they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips

Holy crap. I had no idea. We've heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.

I have never, ever posted a picture of my kids online. I've sent a handful to family and friends via messaging apps, but only ones that are naturally flattering, and that is as far as it goes.

As it turns out, my overwhelming hunch that this is the only decent, respectful course of action in the mindless social media age, seems to be correct.
I love my kids, and I respect them as people, as individuals with a right to privacy at any age.

Reddit looking like Tik Tok, which is looking more like Facebook, which wants to look like Instagram... and what's that over there? Oh look, it's Twitter, spooning glue with its' hand and putting it in its' mouth.

I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take

If you feel compelled to regard everybody as either your unpaid servant or as a hostile entity - except for taking deliberate time to pointedly kiss the Twitter imbecile's ass - maybe, just maybe it's you yourself, with a profound lack of self-awareness, that might be the very root of the problem you're flailing to deal with.

You know what's controversial? Bombing hospitals, schools and residential buildings.

You know what's controversial? Blowing up a dam that destroys an entire region of the country.

You know what's controversial? Keeping a nuclear power plant as hostage.

You know what's controversial? Abducting children and taking them against their will to another country.

You know what's controversial? Torture and mutilation of soldiers defending their home land.

Whoever says or implies at this late stage of russian atrocities that cluster bombs for Ukraine are "controversial" - fuck yourself gently with a rusted chainsaw.

EDIT: typo (half the time I try and type "of", it comes out as "if")

You watch this one thing out of curiosity, morbid curiosity, or by accident, and at the slightest poke the goddamned mindless algorithm starts throwing this shit at you.

The algorithm is "weaponized" for who screams the loudest, and I truly believe it started due to myopic incompetence/greed, not political malice. Which doesn't make it any better, as people don't know how to take care of themselves from this bombardment, but the corporations like to pretend that ~~they~~ people can, so they wash their hands for as long as they are able.

Then on top of this, the algorithm has been further weaponized by even more malicious actors who have figured out how to game the system.
That's how toxic meatheads like infowars and joe rogan get a huge bullhorn that reaches millions. "Huh... DMT experiences... sounds interesting", the format is entertaining... and before you know it, you are listening to anti-vax and qanon excrement, your mind starts to normalize the most outlandish things.

EDIT: a word, for clarity

I rather like the shitpost bombardment. It's the type of thing that creates a party vibe, and it could attract more than a few eyeballs to peek and linger. As the content can be somewhat dry in a community that's just starting out, this helps to normalize the place, make it more familiar to visiting eyes.

This current shitposting challenge sure as hell beats a barrage of anti-reddit, anti-musk, anti-zuckerberg posts, as well as "how does this [Fediverse/instances/posting/etc] work?" dominating the All page.

I think it's an important reminder.

Potato - potatoe, tomato - tomatoe.

You see 196 as

queer and especially trans friendly

I see it as a garden of shitposting delights.

Meanwhile, here in the Fediverse I've been seeing a lot of impressively creative memes. I don't know if they're originating here, or if they're copy-pasted from elsewhere, but I'm comfortable here where memes are concerned.

An apologist for communist dictatorships, who turn a blind eye to - or even justify - their human rights violations.

Broken people breaking things.

Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.

This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.

Any deadweight who shrugs all of this off as bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe WhY bOtHeR VoTiNg is just as much of a social parasite as the goddamned mouthbreathers who vote for this type of creature.
If they ever bother to pause from fondling their purity and superiority then lovingly sniffing their fingers, if they would stop to actually look, they would find that there is a lot of blood on those hands.

Masquerading as "news" while blatantly spewing out whatever toxic and dangerous, insurrectionary bullshit you make up day by day to a community - knowing full well it is bullshit - should and MUST have serious, or at the very least expensive, consequences.

And it's not even about the profit motive, it's about the fundamental way in which he approaches situations with a zero sum game mentality. It's about concentrating power over something as slippery as water, replacing something that works with something shittier BUT that he can control (see Victoria and AMA, or the photo and video hosting instead of continuing with Imgur). It's about regarding with contempt the community that gathered around the site he created.

The GallowBoobs of the site.

I love reading and writing, replying and interacting. The quality of discourse around here has been excellent so far, the right kind of people have migrated here.
Fully granted that there are many topics in which I'd love to see more activity, but the space is young. Neither Rome nor Reddit were built in a day.

Also, a way to keep track of conversations, an unobtrusive notification and a direct link to the spot in any given thread.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

In one of those 70s Fat Albert episodes, I think it was Rudy who one day showed up wearing a jacket of "genuine imitation leather". That term has stuck with me for decades.

Whatever blackout/boycott/migration happens with Reddit, this should go double for Twitter, that's another place I silently dropped like a rock and have never visited again.

When something happens with Ukraine and I feel compelled to dive into it, I've used Nitter, which mirrors the Twitter content but Musk and his right-wing idiocy gets no goddamned clicks and traffic from me anymore.