Well, in my hypothetical scenario, “gamipedia” is not going to have an article about “the sky is”, that’s not really its purpose. Ideally you’d only have one encyclopedia wiki, or multiple that are willing to work together and not duplicate each other’s content. If another competing supposed-encyclopedia instance called “assholepedia” does have an article about “the sky is: a liberal delusion”, then you block and defederate that asshole instance. No big deal.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding how it’s designed but I don’t think I am, and I don’t think that’s how this works.

A topic definition on the wiki includes the instance it’s hosted on. All links to that topic will go to that same instance and all the content for that topic will be served by the one instance as the authoritative source for “That-topic@that-instance” which is the link everyone will use. The federated part is specifically that you can link to topics on other instances and view them through your local instance.

For example, hypothetically, if you are a “fedipedia” author and you are writing a “fedipedia” article about a video game, and you mention a particular feature of the video game, you can include in your “fedipedia” article a link to a topic about that particular feature on “wikia-gamipedia” or even “the-games-own-wiki.site” and interact with and maybe even edit that content without needing to make accounts on all these other wikis. It’s like it’s all hosted on one centralized wiki, but it’s hosted on different servers that are all talking to each other.

Of course, it’s possible both our hypothetical “wikia-gamipedia” AND “the-games-own-wiki.site” will have their OWN, completely SEPARATE topics about the video game feature in question. The topics might even have exactly the same name. That’s allowed. In that case, you’ll have to decide for yourself which one is more credible and useful, and which one you want to link to and interact with, because yes, two different federated wikis can have different topics with totally different content.

Just like on Lemmy you can have two different communities with the same name but totally different people and content because they’re on different instances. That’s not really the general intention of how communities are supposed to work though. The intention is that you can pick the one community that is the “right” one for you, or the largest, and use that and hopefully other people will do the same. You can all pick that same instance/community, no matter which account you live on, even if it’s not hosted on your local instance. You don’t have to use the one from your local instance, or from any particular instance. That’s what the federation does.

China. The people are super nice, sweet, helpful, lovely people. It’s just their government I hate. I don’t know if they hate it too or not since they’re not free to say but I think they’re nice people and they deserve better.

Yeah he’s got some serious abusive spouse energy going on at times with all the emotional whiplash. Beats the shit out of you and then “aww baby, come on, you know I love you” then beats you some more.

I guess they ran out of Public Integrity to report on, there’s none left.

Who would’ve ever thought we would’ve ever needed something like this. I am glad my veteran father never lived to see this happen, it would’ve broken him. This is what he fought against.

There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?

I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked then all your accounts with the same password will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts and cell phone number/identity locked down like Fort Knox, since email and phones can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

Lots of leopards eating people’s faces these days. Probably shouldn’t have voted for the leopards eating people’s faces party.

Violence is an intrinsic part of fascism. It is the inevitable consequence of “might makes right”. Be prepared for a lot more violence. Probably on both sides.

The user is also a Russian propaganda outlet, probably.

“I used to think the complete breakdown of laws, government and society was just funny when was only happening on TV! I never thought it would happen in my town! This is outrageous!” --Person outraged about 50 years too late.

They … rejected … anti-DEI … making them … pro-DEI … and anti-Trump? Am I getting that right? Sorry, there are just getting to be a lot of double-negatives these days it’s hard to keep track.