You forgot interrobang‽ The most important and incredulous reason for a compose key.

This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…

Yeah, that’s fair enough, though I’m not sure it’s very different from malicious instances creating normal user accounts?

You can see when users from an instance are all suspiciously voting the same way at the same time regardless of whether they are usernames or IDs.

There’s lots of legitimate users that only vote but never post so doing it based on that doesn’t seem very effective?

The second problem is solved using public key cryptography, the same way that you can’t impersonate someone else’s username to post comments. Votes and comments are digitally signed (There would need to be a different public key for voting to maintain pseudonymity though).

How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.

Looks more /usr/bucket/cat

Best is very subjective.

.world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.

For “general discussion” it doesn’t really matter. The instances are federated so you’ll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.

Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There’s sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It’s kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn’t matter.

True! It’s not just a Latin thing and Slavic languages have it too. I wonder where it came from originally. Probably one of those Proto Indo European things. Though it’s in some Indigenous Australian languages too (though not all) so might be even older?

Yep. Most Latin languages have gendered nouns. Italian, Spanish, German etc. All have masculine/feminine objects.

Eg. In Italian a fork is feminine (la forchetta) but a spoon is masculine (il cucchiaio). A table in your living room is a boy (il tavolo) but a table that you’re eating lunch on is a girl (la tavola).

It’s bizarre.

What was the original text‽

No, that’s “Monk”

A manc is a place where you can go to deposit your money and get home loans and stuff.

It’s an idiom that comes from shooting something in the sky (like a bird or a plane) so that it falls down to the ground. Usually with a gun or a bow or similar weapon. “He shot down that plane!”

To shoot down an idea is like to discredit it. To show that it is not true (by metaphorically blasting the idea out of the sky and making it crash into the earth).

“aborigines” is not a great word to use these days. It’s generally seen as pretty offensive to Indigenous Australians as it’s a bit dehumanising and comes from colinisers who treated people like animals.

Better to go with “First Nations people”, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” or “Indigenous Australians.”

But yes, they’ve been treated (and in many cases continue to be treated) pretty horribly.

Interesting. I remember there being fewer ads but the ones that did exist were worse. Bright colours, flashing, blink tags, 3-frame epilepsy inducing animated gifs… “You are the 10000th visitor!” Some in the mid to late 90s would pop-up new windows or even start autoplaying sound…