Sure, it’s fine. But if I’m only publishing text and photos, and I don’t need tons of specialized plugins, and I’m dealing with things myself - then personally I will go with a static-site generator every time. It’s at least as fast, and more secure by design.

Did not know that. Useful.

Full DB-driven monster for a few bytes of text. Sledgehammer to crack a nut if you ask me. But sure, this is the obvious answer.

Even more interesting IMO: what are the options that do not involve self-hosting (thus avoiding the PITA of babysitting a domain and server security)?

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

IMO most of the suggestions here are small beer.

If you want to be very scientific about this, and to calculate cumulative sums of harm, with no discount for the future, then just look for some little-known hydrocarbons corp - it will top the list.

If you apply a future discount, but no discount (or a small one) for the suffering of non-human animals, then some meat company will probably top the list.

Ha, good analogy.

For humans, that’s true with caveats. For the natural world of which they are a part and on whose continued health they depend for their future wellbeing - it is not true in any way, shape or form.

The correct answer is usually the most boring one.

This sounds like an elaborate way of saying you want to blog.

Or, as the kids call it these days, “to post on my Substack”. The two things being identical except that the latter sounds cooler and allows them to indulge their corporate Stockholm syndrome.

A decade out. Yeltsin chose him.

There are vanishingly few tourists in Xinjiang. Indeed they won’t even give you a visa if you say you’re going there.

Order. Conformity. Mystery. Impenetrable language. Impossible writing. Eating anything that moves. Mindless nationalism. People who don’t talk or even care about politics. Depressed single young people obsessed with shopping. Security cameras. Police. Airport-sized train stations. Electric scooters. Electric cars. Utopian-dystopian sci-fi.

Yes, I have been there multiple times.

PS: to be clear, I was very, very impressed by those trains and especially by the electrification of city transport. In Shenzhen the air is now cleaner than any big city in the West and with all the greenery and silence it really does have a utopian feel. The progress there is genuine, it’s amazing, it deserves lots and lots of credit.

Yes, I know all that and I completely agree. It’s all but impossible to imagine that the USA will ever be an actually dictatorship, despite the ignorant shrieking around here. Because of its traditions of individual freedom and federalism.

But it’s obviously looking less and less like democracy.

That’s a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won’t be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.

Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.

Second, America’s two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don’t even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. “There are only two parties” is just not a valid argument in this debate.

Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.

I like it. The reasoning’s good.

I hate the term “instance”. It’s hopelessly geeky (it derives from object-oriented programming). It brings to mind nerds and gamers in basements.

This is the correct response to OP’s transparently bad-faith question.

Indeed, and I get the feeling that the point of your comment is not to ask any question but rather to propagate that smear even though you probably haven’t even looked into whether or not it was justified.

Or perhaps you have, and you can tell me (us) why it was?

Sounds great! As a moderate I would fit right in! Oh - except I’m not allowed to.

PS: to be clear, I mean I can’t do it with this account because it’s not federated AFAICT.