So…while biology does account for male and female reproductive systems across a variety of species, they have found that, as they continue to study many different forms of life, that they actually have to keep adjusting the model of what they once thought. Life is weirder, more complex, and accounts for a tremendous amount of variation in how this whole thing works.

I’m not a biologist, there are experts who can speak extremely well on this subject. Within the field of biology, the whole “two sexes” thing is kind of an oversimplification. Even if we just focus on humans and not, say, some form of algae with 500 different sexes, there are plenty of divergent forms of human beings that manifest as some form of intersex, with quite a few different variations.

Even if intersex people are a fraction of a fraction of the population, they are a compelling case study for why things don’t definitively boil down across some kind of sexual binary across the board for absolutely everyone. Heck, even males and females in the traditional sense of sexual dimorphism tend to exhibit traits of the other sex in one way or another.

TL;DR - it’s a huge complicated can of worms, and people who try to shutdown discussion of nonbinary or transgender identities with “there’s only two sexes, it’s just science!” tend to have a grade-school understanding of biology.

Her comments cover everything from “trans women are mostly autistic boys who have been gaslit” to “there are only two sexes” to “trans people are unfit to play in their gender’s sport.” However, there are far worse comments floating around out there that talk about genital mutilation and all kinds of other heinous shit.

I think the policy has more to do with your server’s IP address. The language on the page is a bit vague, since they absolutely collect the IP addresses of their own users.

You aren’t making the point you think you’re making. Sure, at somewhere between 8 to 11 million accounts, the Fediverse is a small pond. Meta is a gigantic whale. Ingesting the entire graph of everyone on the network would be relatively trivial for them, storage-wise.

Ostensibly, yes. However, as a company whose business model is primarily predicated on sale of personal data and analytics, this does create something of a conflict of interest, especially because of Meta’s extensive involvement in surveillance capitalism.

Per the article, I really like Mike Macgirvin’s stance of “I’ll give you the bare minimum of data to make basic interactions work, but not one thing more.”

Altering the language of a service policy (or, writing a new one) is usually a good indication that something is indeed about to change at a larger level.

I’m pretty sure they mean respective to themselves and their own walled garden, but it definitely doesn’t scan well.

Technically, yes, you save metadata of all of those things. However: you are not a company that profits from vast amounts of data ingestion.

Yeah, I feel like they’d probably get better mileage with something like Meilisearch, which is what Firefish uses for search.

Did they, though? A bunch of other Fediverse platforms have supported this for literally years, to the point that Mastodon was the butt of jokes for breaking basic search functionality.

Having standard search that just works is a huge deal, and helps solve against the decentralized content discovery problem.

I was under the impression that Mobilizon was primarily just for events? That was their original premise when they launched a few years ago.

Pixelfed is basically a federated alternative to Instagram that’s been picking up a massive amount of momentum. The Groups feature is more or less federated Facebook Groups, with a bunch of robust tools built in, and will be compatible with Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines.

The reason this is significant is that it may prove to be the final push that makes groups a standard part of the Fediverse experience. Some of the biggest platforms in the space have lacked it, for years and years. This implementation could prove to be a really good blueprint of what the standard experience ought to provide, at a bare minimum.

Yeah, I’ve definitely thought about that a bit. I think I could also see meme groups similar to the ones on Facebook becoming kind of a big deal, which could actually be amazing for getting more people onto something like Pixelfed.

Yeah, that’s a tough one. I have mixed feelings about it.

What I’d really like to see is a benevolent, impartial non-profit act as an umbrella organization that stewards a lot of this critical infrastructure. Non-profits aren’t perfect, and there are lots of questions regarding funding and sponsorships and the ethics of taking money from, say, Meta. But, I think such a thing could be really positive in the right hands.

Yeah, it’s definitely a weird problem. My initial reaction was something along the lines of “Isn’t there a decentralized way to do this?!” and…to my knowledge, there really isn’t? Like, you could distribute knowledge of user account associations across every instance in a peer-to-peer way, I guess, but that’s kind of ridiculous and pretty wasteful.

I think having small central services that improve the quality of life for decentralized services is largely a good thing, so long as they’re open source and not just some corporate product with vendor lock-in. It does kind of feel like a contradiction in terms, sometimes.

Hey, I’m the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren’t many instances yet. It’s become a very active community, and I’m constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.

This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it’s an interesting idea.

I don’t really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a “Neutral Zone” between instances while sharing all kinds of news.

In the end, I don’t really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there’s always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I’m not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.

Oh, I thought that was just a client SDK. Is it an actual server backend?

I’m pretty curious about Veilid, and eager to check it out. But, I believe that peer-to-peer and federated could theoretically complement each other very well, especially when it comes to building infrastructure for this big weird network we’re a part of.

How much is a houndred? Is it more than a dogzon? 😋

It’s funny. When I was typing my original response, I was under the impression that Dendrite was Rust-based! 😂 I’m really glad I checked before posting!