#anarchists — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #anarchists, aggregated by home.social.
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#MutualAid Is Having a Moment in #PortlandOR. Here Are 5 Initiatives to Support.
An unscientific guide to the proliferating number of groups providing aid to those in need.
By Fiona McCann June 14, 2021
"After a year and change of pandemic life, what’s left but to help each other out? Portlanders have stepped up to supply each other with everything from funds for gas bills to warm dim sum via a proliferation of mutual aid groups. There’s even a podcast now to help guide you through it all (find the #MutualAidCoalitionNorthwest on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts—for free, natch.) Here are five initiatives to restore your faith in the kindness of strangers.
Started by a 19-year-old college freshman, Tutoring Bloc offers free tutoring via Zoom to underresourced students, pairing pupils from preschool to college with volunteer tutors. They also help those interested get library cards and access to books.
#PetBlocPDXGot a pet in need of a home? Having trouble looking after your furry friends? PetBlocPDX has your back, offering supplies—pet treats, canine coats, and more—and financial assistance for pets and their people.
#PDXWoodBlocPDX Wood Bloc, who per their Twitter account are '#anarchists with no money who collect and give out wood to people in Portland,' found themselves in high demand after power outages last February prompted a mad dash for other heat sources. They continue to offer yard cleanups and firewood donations for summer campfires.
#MendingBlocFrom #Mending clothes for protesters and community members to sharing #zines on how to sew on patches, Mending Bloc also shows up with masks and pins at events, and offers to repurpose fabric into everything from balaclavas to pet vests.
So Many #FoodBlocs
It being Portland, there’s a bloc for what feels like every item in the pantry—hot potatoes (Potato Bloc) to tamales (Tamale Bloc) and more. For a full list of these and other blocs or mutual aid orgs, check out the '211 directory of PDX blocs' Bloc Bloc PDX."
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#MutualAid Is Having a Moment in #PortlandOR. Here Are 5 Initiatives to Support.
An unscientific guide to the proliferating number of groups providing aid to those in need.
By Fiona McCann June 14, 2021
"After a year and change of pandemic life, what’s left but to help each other out? Portlanders have stepped up to supply each other with everything from funds for gas bills to warm dim sum via a proliferation of mutual aid groups. There’s even a podcast now to help guide you through it all (find the #MutualAidCoalitionNorthwest on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts—for free, natch.) Here are five initiatives to restore your faith in the kindness of strangers.
Started by a 19-year-old college freshman, Tutoring Bloc offers free tutoring via Zoom to underresourced students, pairing pupils from preschool to college with volunteer tutors. They also help those interested get library cards and access to books.
#PetBlocPDXGot a pet in need of a home? Having trouble looking after your furry friends? PetBlocPDX has your back, offering supplies—pet treats, canine coats, and more—and financial assistance for pets and their people.
#PDXWoodBlocPDX Wood Bloc, who per their Twitter account are '#anarchists with no money who collect and give out wood to people in Portland,' found themselves in high demand after power outages last February prompted a mad dash for other heat sources. They continue to offer yard cleanups and firewood donations for summer campfires.
#MendingBlocFrom #Mending clothes for protesters and community members to sharing #zines on how to sew on patches, Mending Bloc also shows up with masks and pins at events, and offers to repurpose fabric into everything from balaclavas to pet vests.
So Many #FoodBlocs
It being Portland, there’s a bloc for what feels like every item in the pantry—hot potatoes (Potato Bloc) to tamales (Tamale Bloc) and more. For a full list of these and other blocs or mutual aid orgs, check out the '211 directory of PDX blocs' Bloc Bloc PDX."
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#Trump counterterrorism strategy names “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including #Anarchists #antifascists as 1 of 3 “major types of #terror groups” facing US, placing them in same category list as #narcoterrorists, transnational #gangs, legacy #Islamist #terrorist groups. #US counterterrorism activity will prioritize “rapid identification neutralization” of "violent secular" #political groups whose ideology is “anti-American,” “radically pro #transgender,” anarchist. https://www.bespacific.com/trump-strategy-names-antifa-among-major-types-of-terror-groups/
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#Trump counterterrorism strategy names “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including #Anarchists #antifascists as 1 of 3 “major types of #terror groups” facing US, placing them in same category list as #narcoterrorists, transnational #gangs, legacy #Islamist #terrorist groups. #US counterterrorism activity will prioritize “rapid identification neutralization” of "violent secular" #political groups whose ideology is “anti-American,” “radically pro #transgender,” anarchist. https://www.bespacific.com/trump-strategy-names-antifa-among-major-types-of-terror-groups/
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Slideshow from today
Punk rock version is on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ntxcELf-sHA#VictoriaBC #Antifascist #Decolonization #CommunityConnecting #CommunityCare #CommunityBuilding #PeopleHelpingPeople #AntiCapitalist #BeTheChange #CommunityBuilders #nonprofits #Anarchists #AntiRacism #AntiAbleism #CollectiveAction #CommunityCollectives #VancouverIsland #diversity #inclusion #CovidSafety #MasksSolidarity
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Slideshow from today
Punk rock version is on YouTube.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ntxcELf-sHA#VictoriaBC #Antifascist #Decolonization #CommunityConnecting #CommunityCare #CommunityBuilding #PeopleHelpingPeople #AntiCapitalist #BeTheChange #CommunityBuilders #nonprofits #Anarchists #AntiRacism #AntiAbleism #CollectiveAction #CommunityCollectives #VancouverIsland #diversity #inclusion #CovidSafety #MasksSolidarity
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#Grassroots engagement to build up a stronger, localized, #MutualAssistance network.
#VictoriaBC #Antifascist #Decolonization #CommunityConnecting #CommunityCare #CommunityBuilding #PeopleHelpingPeople #AntiCapitalist #BeTheChange #CommunityBuilders #nonprofits #Anarchists #AntiRacism #AntiAbleism #CollectiveAction #CommunityCollectives #VancouverIsland #diversity #inclusion
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#Grassroots engagement to build up a stronger, localized, #MutualAssistance network.
#VictoriaBC #Antifascist #Decolonization #CommunityConnecting #CommunityCare #CommunityBuilding #PeopleHelpingPeople #AntiCapitalist #BeTheChange #CommunityBuilders #nonprofits #Anarchists #AntiRacism #AntiAbleism #CollectiveAction #CommunityCollectives #VancouverIsland #diversity #inclusion
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Dear Friends of the instant instance,
As you may know:
+ occasionally parts of the fediverse are attacked by rogue mis-governments such as the current mis-admin in USA (Useless State of America) 🌎
+ The fediverse has recovery built in by our beloved creators, hosters and admins :blobheart:
+ one day god and finances willing I will have my own instance, maybe even posthumously or from a benevolent zombie... :ablobwave:Obviously I would not be a fair admin. I will put in the edit box "Have you kicked a Nazi in the nuts", instead of the more usual 'What's on your mind'
I Iz violent and illegal and non kosher.Woe is me. 💩
Be that as it may. I would welcome #anarchists of all available #genders. Support bigoted #atheists and religious types to change their opinions for #FAQ's.
I would also have a troll feeding area (they taste of jerk chicken) for the famished. Other innovations would be the banning of any rules that can not be changed. Might need a Judge for that... :omya_mastodon:Oh yes I have a plan (which I will abandon as soon as possible or at least regularly. If you wish to be a part of the admin team please contact someone (preferably not me) :blobDab:
Have a great day everyone. Release the Wombles. Fredom 4 Tooting. She who dares. Wins. [lobster rambles off into the sunset] :elmo_fire:
:hearthands: :fedi: :vulcan_hmn_g1:
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Dear Friends of the instant instance,
As you may know:
+ occasionally parts of the fediverse are attacked by rogue mis-governments such as the current mis-admin in USA (Useless State of America) 🌎
+ The fediverse has recovery built in by our beloved creators, hosters and admins :blobheart:
+ one day god and finances willing I will have my own instance, maybe even posthumously or from a benevolent zombie... :ablobwave:Obviously I would not be a fair admin. I will put in the edit box "Have you kicked a Nazi in the nuts", instead of the more usual 'What's on your mind'
I Iz violent and illegal and non kosher.Woe is me. 💩
Be that as it may. I would welcome #anarchists of all available #genders. Support bigoted #atheists and religious types to change their opinions for #FAQ's.
I would also have a troll feeding area (they taste of jerk chicken) for the famished. Other innovations would be the banning of any rules that can not be changed. Might need a Judge for that... :omya_mastodon:Oh yes I have a plan (which I will abandon as soon as possible or at least regularly. If you wish to be a part of the admin team please contact someone (preferably not me) :blobDab:
Have a great day everyone. Release the Wombles. Fredom 4 Tooting. She who dares. Wins. [lobster rambles off into the sunset] :elmo_fire:
:hearthands: :fedi: :vulcan_hmn_g1:
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Dear Friends of the instant instance,
As you may know:
+ occasionally parts of the fediverse are attacked by rogue mis-governments such as the current mis-admin in USA (Useless State of America) 🌎
+ The fediverse has recovery built in by our beloved creators, hosters and admins :blobheart:
+ one day god and finances willing I will have my own instance, maybe even posthumously or from a benevolent zombie... :ablobwave:Obviously I would not be a fair admin. I will put in the edit box "Have you kicked a Nazi in the nuts", instead of the more usual 'What's on your mind'
I Iz violent and illegal and non kosher.Woe is me. 💩
Be that as it may. I would welcome #anarchists of all available #genders. Support bigoted #atheists and religious types to change their opinions for #FAQ's.
I would also have a troll feeding area (they taste of jerk chicken) for the famished. Other innovations would be the banning of any rules that can not be changed. Might need a Judge for that... :omya_mastodon:Oh yes I have a plan (which I will abandon as soon as possible or at least regularly. If you wish to be a part of the admin team please contact someone (preferably not me) :blobDab:
Have a great day everyone. Release the Wombles. Fredom 4 Tooting. She who dares. Wins. [lobster rambles off into the sunset] :elmo_fire:
:hearthands: :fedi: :vulcan_hmn_g1:
-
Dear Friends of the instant instance,
As you may know:
+ occasionally parts of the fediverse are attacked by rogue mis-governments such as the current mis-admin in USA (Useless State of America) 🌎
+ The fediverse has recovery built in by our beloved creators, hosters and admins :blobheart:
+ one day god and finances willing I will have my own instance, maybe even posthumously or from a benevolent zombie... :ablobwave:Obviously I would not be a fair admin. I will put in the edit box "Have you kicked a Nazi in the nuts", instead of the more usual 'What's on your mind'
I Iz violent and illegal and non kosher.Woe is me. 💩
Be that as it may. I would welcome #anarchists of all available #genders. Support bigoted #atheists and religious types to change their opinions for #FAQ's.
I would also have a troll feeding area (they taste of jerk chicken) for the famished. Other innovations would be the banning of any rules that can not be changed. Might need a Judge for that... :omya_mastodon:Oh yes I have a plan (which I will abandon as soon as possible or at least regularly. If you wish to be a part of the admin team please contact someone (preferably not me) :blobDab:
Have a great day everyone. Release the Wombles. Fredom 4 Tooting. She who dares. Wins. [lobster rambles off into the sunset] :elmo_fire:
:hearthands: :fedi: :vulcan_hmn_g1:
-
Dear Friends of the instant instance,
As you may know:
+ occasionally part of the fediverse are attacked by rogue mis-governments such as the current mis-admin in USA (Useless State of America) 🌎
+ The fediverse has recovery built in by our beloved creators, hosters and admins :blobheart:
+ one day god and finances willing I will have my own instance, maybe even posthumously or from a benevolent zombie... :ablobwave:Obviously I would not be a fair admin. I put in the edit box "Have you you kicked a Nazi in the nuts" instead of the more usual 'What's on your mind'
I Iz violent and illegal and non kosher.Woe is me. 💩
Be that as it may. I would welcome #anarchists of all available #genders. Support bigoted #atheists and religious types to change their opinions for #FAQ's.
I would also have a troll feeding area (they taste of jerk chicken) for the famished. Other innovations would be the banning of any rules that can not be changed. Might need a Judge for that...Oh yes I have a plan (which I will abandon as soon as possible or at least regularly. If you wish to be a part of the admin team please contact someone (preferably not me) :blobDab:
Have a great day everyone. Release the Wombles. Fredom 4 Tooting. She who dares. Wins. [lobster rambles off into the sunset] :elmo_fire:
:hearthands: :fedi: :vulcan_hmn_g1:
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I am Not Migrating Back To IRC
So, with this whole Discord surveillance age verification situation, I am seeing lots of talk on every social media platform, including Discord ironically, about moving back to IRC. I am not going back to IRC. Though, I do not really have a valid interest in it, because I use Discord just to monitor occult cults and extremist groups, lol. So, it is not like I would be really displaced, anyway. I would just need to figure out a new exploit or hack.
I’m a Computational Biologist, so I am half in Biology and half in software engineering. I tend to look at technology and evolution as analogous to one another. Software, dynamical systems, and evolution are analogous. Evolution functions like a survivorship process. Lineages that leave more descendants become more represented over time where drift, mutation, recombination, and migration all perturb the system. It’s a stochastic dynamical system.
Speciation is a change under isolation. Once gene flow is cut off, divergence accumulates. Eventually, compatibility breaks, creating a divergence. A fork. You can think of it in a version control system like this: you stop merging upstream commits. You accumulate independent changes, and at some point the codebases are no longer interchangeable.
With evolution, even when traits resemble ancestral forms, they arise through new mutations in the current system. It’s a forward, not backward, branch. So from an evolutionary and software engineering perspective, progress happens by forking and optimizing what exists. That means you will not get progress by trying to migrate everyone back to legacy infrastructure.
I’m not migrating to IRC because it is not progress or evolution. It is technologically regressive. Regressive attitudes are why we are essentially in a weird, industrial, cyberpunk version of the 1930s right now. Hoping old-school forums make a comeback and that everyone migrates back to IRC is a technological and societal regression. It’s the same nostalgia-driven impulse that MAGA rides on. It’s not evolutionary or progressive. It’s regressive and backward. So that triggers all the alarm bells in my head, because this is sort of how we got here. Donald Trump rode in on a regressive platform of nostalgia and populism. Roughly 10–12% of Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 voted for Donald Trump under that wave.
Trump’s 2016 rise was driven significantly by populist themes such as critiques of establishment politics, nationalism, economic resentment, and appeals to voters dissatisfied with the status quo in both parties. Anyone paying attention in 2026 should see the cycle repeating itself. This weird form of technological regression is a techno-populist version of it. America never learns is lesson, does it?
Currently, I am on Matrix, albeit I use it more or less for bridge and puppeteer bot purposes. To me, it’s like going back to using muskets when everyone else is using AK-47s. The solution is not to make more regressive pieces of technology. They are least effective when you are essentially in a guerrilla, stochastic war with your own fascist government.
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So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.
I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.
Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.
So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.
What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:
The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.
Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.
It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.
Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.
As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.
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So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.
I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.
Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.
So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.
What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:
The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.
Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.
It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.
Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.
As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.
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Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
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Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
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Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
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Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
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BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity
I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”
Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.
Bluesky mentions that here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update
As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.
I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.
Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.
Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.
Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.
Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.
Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.
Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.
I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.
In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.
I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
-
BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity
I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”
Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.
Bluesky mentions that here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update
As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.
I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.
Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.
Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.
Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.
Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.
Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.
Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.
I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.
In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.
I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.
-
BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity
I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”
Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.
Bluesky mentions that here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update
As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.
I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.
Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.
Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.
Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.
Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.
Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.
Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.
I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.
In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.
I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
-
BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity
I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”
Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.
Bluesky mentions that here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update
As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.
I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.
Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.
Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.
Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.
Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.
Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.
Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.
I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.
In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.
I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
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Astroturfing Is Pretty Pointless When Social Subgraphs Are Fragmented (e.g., the Fediverse)
I am seeing astroturfing in the fediverse again, by AT Protocol developers implicitly trying to shill their products. I think it is stochastic behavior by developers with too much time on their hands. Honestly, I do not care. I like the people on ActivityPub more, but I like the AT Protocol better, and I have developed for both. Astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is fascinating to me because it is so pointless.
I am actually a Computational Biologist and Computer Scientist whose specialty is combinatorics, social graphs, graph theory, etc. Specifically, I use this to create epidemiological models for the memetic layer of human behaviors that act as vectors for diseases, using the SIRS model. I do not just study germs; I study human behaviors.
The models I construct extend into a “memetic layer,” in which beliefs, norms, and behaviors (such as risk-taking, compliance with public health measures, or susceptibility to misinformation) spread contagiously through social networks. These behaviors function as vectors that modulate biological transmission rates. As a result, the spread of ideas can accelerate, dampen, or reshape the spread of disease. By running computational simulations and agent-based models on these graphs, I study how network structure, influential nodes, clustering, and platform-specific dynamics affect behavioral contagion. I also examine how these factors influence epidemiological outcomes.
To say it very concisely, I study how the spread of bat-shit insane beliefs, shit posts, and memes influences whether or not there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Ironically, this is an evolution of my studying semiotics, memetics, and chaos magick in high school. I got a job where I can use occult, anarchist techniques professionally.
I think a large reason why I do not care about astroturfing in the fediverse is that it’s so pointless, lol. Astroturfing to manipulate the narrative would actually work better on Bluesky to keep people there than trying to recruit from the fediverse. Furthermore, big instances are relatively small. Some people on Bluesky have follower lists larger than an entire large instance in the fediverse.
Within ActivityPub networks, astroturfing rarely propagates far, because whether information spreads depends on properties of the social graph itself. Dense connectivity, short paths between communities, and a sufficient number of cross-cutting ties support diffusion. ActivityPub’s architecture tends to produce graphs that are fragmented and highly modular. This limits the reach of coordinated activity.
ActivityPub is a system where each instance maintains its own local user graph and exchanges activities through inboxes and outboxes. This makes it autonomous and decentralized. The network consists of loosely connected subgraphs. Cross-instance edges appear only through explicit follow relationships. The ActivityPub protocol does not provide a shared or complete view of the network. Measurements of the fediverse consistently show uneven connectivity between instances, clustering at the instance level, and relatively long effective path lengths across the network. Under these conditions, large cascades are uncommon.
Instance-level clustering means that in ActivityPub networks, users interact much more with others on the same server than with users on different servers. Because each instance has its own local timeline, culture, and moderation, connections form densely within instances and only sparsely across them through explicit follow relationships. This creates a network made up of tightly connected local communities linked by relatively few cross-instance ties, which slows the spread of information beyond its point of origin.
However, with the AT Protocol, global indexing and aggregation are explicitly supported. Relays and indexers can assemble near-complete views of the social graph. Applications built on top of this infrastructure operate over a graph that is denser and easier to traverse. There are fewer structural barriers between communities. The diffusion dynamics change substantially when content can move across the graph without relying on narrow federated paths.
Astroturfing depends on coordinated amplification, typically through tightly synchronized clusters of accounts intended to manufacture visibility. Work on coordinated inauthentic behavior shows that these tactics gain traction when they intersect highly connected regions of the graph or bridge otherwise separate communities. In networks with strong modularity, coordination remains local. ActivityPub’s federation model produces this kind of modularity by default. Coordinated clusters stand out clearly within instances. Their effects remain confined to those local neighborhoods.
Astroturfing on ActivityPub therefore tends to stall on its own because of the underlying graph topology. Without dense inter-instance connectivity or any form of global indexing, coordinated campaigns have a hard time moving beyond the immediate regions where they originate. Systems built on globally indexable social graphs, including those enabled by the AT Protocol, expose a much larger surface for viral spread. Network structure and connectivity account for the divergence where that is independent of moderation, cultural norms, ideology, or intent.
It’s just really funny to me how these stochastic techbro groups waste so many resources. I personally don’t want to go viral, which is why I avoid platforms where I can. The fact that it’s harder to achieve high virality on ActivityPub is exactly why I prefer the fediverse over the Atmosphere. One way to think about it is that you can change the ‘genetics’ of a system with a retrovirus, where memetic entities act as cultural retroviruses to reprogram the cultural loci of a space. That is their end goal. They are trying to hijack cultures memetically. You see this a lot with culture jamming.
Basically, the astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is designed to jam and subvert the culture. But, as I have already said, the topological structure makes memetic virality stall. They cannot achieve that kind of viral spread in the fediverse, which is why I cannot understand why they do this every year.
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Astroturfing Is Pretty Pointless When Social Subgraphs Are Fragmented (e.g., the Fediverse)
I am seeing astroturfing in the fediverse again, by AT Protocol developers implicitly trying to shill their products. I think it is stochastic behavior by developers with too much time on their hands. Honestly, I do not care. I like the people on ActivityPub more, but I like the AT Protocol better, and I have developed for both. Astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is fascinating to me because it is so pointless.
I am actually a Computational Biologist and Computer Scientist whose specialty is combinatorics, social graphs, graph theory, etc. Specifically, I use this to create epidemiological models for the memetic layer of human behaviors that act as vectors for diseases, using the SIRS model. I do not just study germs; I study human behaviors.
The models I construct extend into a “memetic layer,” in which beliefs, norms, and behaviors (such as risk-taking, compliance with public health measures, or susceptibility to misinformation) spread contagiously through social networks. These behaviors function as vectors that modulate biological transmission rates. As a result, the spread of ideas can accelerate, dampen, or reshape the spread of disease. By running computational simulations and agent-based models on these graphs, I study how network structure, influential nodes, clustering, and platform-specific dynamics affect behavioral contagion. I also examine how these factors influence epidemiological outcomes.
To say it very concisely, I study how the spread of bat-shit insane beliefs, shit posts, and memes influences whether or not there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Ironically, this is an evolution of my studying semiotics, memetics, and chaos magick in high school. I got a job where I can use occult, anarchist techniques professionally.
I think a large reason why I do not care about astroturfing in the fediverse is that it’s so pointless, lol. Astroturfing to manipulate the narrative would actually work better on Bluesky to keep people there than trying to recruit from the fediverse. Furthermore, big instances are relatively small. Some people on Bluesky have follower lists larger than an entire large instance in the fediverse.
Within ActivityPub networks, astroturfing rarely propagates far, because whether information spreads depends on properties of the social graph itself. Dense connectivity, short paths between communities, and a sufficient number of cross-cutting ties support diffusion. ActivityPub’s architecture tends to produce graphs that are fragmented and highly modular. This limits the reach of coordinated activity.
ActivityPub is a system where each instance maintains its own local user graph and exchanges activities through inboxes and outboxes. This makes it autonomous and decentralized. The network consists of loosely connected subgraphs. Cross-instance edges appear only through explicit follow relationships. The ActivityPub protocol does not provide a shared or complete view of the network. Measurements of the fediverse consistently show uneven connectivity between instances, clustering at the instance level, and relatively long effective path lengths across the network. Under these conditions, large cascades are uncommon.
Instance-level clustering means that in ActivityPub networks, users interact much more with others on the same server than with users on different servers. Because each instance has its own local timeline, culture, and moderation, connections form densely within instances and only sparsely across them through explicit follow relationships. This creates a network made up of tightly connected local communities linked by relatively few cross-instance ties, which slows the spread of information beyond its point of origin.
However, with the AT Protocol, global indexing and aggregation are explicitly supported. Relays and indexers can assemble near-complete views of the social graph. Applications built on top of this infrastructure operate over a graph that is denser and easier to traverse. There are fewer structural barriers between communities. The diffusion dynamics change substantially when content can move across the graph without relying on narrow federated paths.
Astroturfing depends on coordinated amplification, typically through tightly synchronized clusters of accounts intended to manufacture visibility. Work on coordinated inauthentic behavior shows that these tactics gain traction when they intersect highly connected regions of the graph or bridge otherwise separate communities. In networks with strong modularity, coordination remains local. ActivityPub’s federation model produces this kind of modularity by default. Coordinated clusters stand out clearly within instances. Their effects remain confined to those local neighborhoods.
Astroturfing on ActivityPub therefore tends to stall on its own because of the underlying graph topology. Without dense inter-instance connectivity or any form of global indexing, coordinated campaigns have a hard time moving beyond the immediate regions where they originate. Systems built on globally indexable social graphs, including those enabled by the AT Protocol, expose a much larger surface for viral spread. Network structure and connectivity account for the divergence where that is independent of moderation, cultural norms, ideology, or intent.
It’s just really funny to me how these stochastic techbro groups waste so many resources. I personally don’t want to go viral, which is why I avoid platforms where I can. The fact that it’s harder to achieve high virality on ActivityPub is exactly why I prefer the fediverse over the Atmosphere. One way to think about it is that you can change the ‘genetics’ of a system with a retrovirus, where memetic entities act as cultural retroviruses to reprogram the cultural loci of a space. That is their end goal. They are trying to hijack cultures memetically. You see this a lot with culture jamming.
Basically, the astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is designed to jam and subvert the culture. But, as I have already said, the topological structure makes memetic virality stall. They cannot achieve that kind of viral spread in the fediverse, which is why I cannot understand why they do this every year.
-
The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
-
The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
-
The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
-
Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules
So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate
A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:
“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”
— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)
I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.
ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.
Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.
Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.
What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.
Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!
On to the convo:
A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.
By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.
This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.
Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?
The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.
The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.
It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.
-
Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules
So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate
A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:
“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”
— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)
I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.
ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.
Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.
Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.
What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.
Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!
On to the convo:
A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.
By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.
This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.
Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?
The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.
The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.
It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.
-
"#anarchists" who aren't also #communists give me a very bad vibe ngl
-
"#anarchists" who aren't also #communists give me a very bad vibe ngl
-
"#anarchists" who aren't also #communists give me a very bad vibe ngl
-
"#anarchists" who aren't also #communists give me a very bad vibe ngl
-
"#anarchists" who aren't also #communists give me a very bad vibe ngl
-
Greek anarchist legal aid benefit
Vrankrijk, Amsterdam, vrijdag 12 december om 19:00 CET
Röt Stewart (be) / Nn17 (nl) / Crowbite (nl) / Dj Rengo Estar / Greek Anarchist Legal Aid Benefit
Friday Punk Night!! Voku 7-9pm & Gig 9pm-Late
The benefit is for comrades in Greece who are currently in an appeal procedure over incidents during the resquatting of Matrozou 45 and have been handed a 6.5 year sentence. The appeal trial is taking place on 02 December 2025. Initially the sentence was lower but the Greek state intervened and wanted to make an example of them and demanded the sentence handed out was more severe.The four accused comrades were found guilty with a total sentence of 77 months for property damage and grievous bodily harm against the riot cops involved in the eviction.
All proceeds will go towards their ongoing trial costs. No squatters in prison!
With Röt Stewart (be)
Fast and ugly hardcore from BelgiumNN17 (nl)
Punk from the sewers of AmsterdamCrowbite (nl)
Folk core punk from AmsterdamDj Rengo Estar playing ska punk oi plus merch stands
Date & Time:
Friday, 12 December, 2025 - 19:00Price:
3-5 €
👥 by Autonomia Promotions (source)
https://acties.todon.nl/event/greek-anarchist-legal-aid-benefit
-
Greek anarchist legal aid benefit
Vrankrijk, Amsterdam, vrijdag 12 december om 19:00 CET
Röt Stewart (be) / Nn17 (nl) / Crowbite (nl) / Dj Rengo Estar / Greek Anarchist Legal Aid Benefit
Friday Punk Night!! Voku 7-9pm & Gig 9pm-Late
The benefit is for comrades in Greece who are currently in an appeal procedure over incidents during the resquatting of Matrozou 45 and have been handed a 6.5 year sentence. The appeal trial is taking place on 02 December 2025. Initially the sentence was lower but the Greek state intervened and wanted to make an example of them and demanded the sentence handed out was more severe.The four accused comrades were found guilty with a total sentence of 77 months for property damage and grievous bodily harm against the riot cops involved in the eviction.
All proceeds will go towards their ongoing trial costs. No squatters in prison!
With Röt Stewart (be)
Fast and ugly hardcore from BelgiumNN17 (nl)
Punk from the sewers of AmsterdamCrowbite (nl)
Folk core punk from AmsterdamDj Rengo Estar playing ska punk oi plus merch stands
Date & Time:
Friday, 12 December, 2025 - 19:00Price:
3-5 €
👥 by Autonomia Promotions (source)
https://acties.todon.nl/event/greek-anarchist-legal-aid-benefit
-
Greek anarchist legal aid benefit
Vrankrijk, Amsterdam, vrijdag 12 december om 19:00 CET
Röt Stewart (be) / Nn17 (nl) / Crowbite (nl) / Dj Rengo Estar / Greek Anarchist Legal Aid Benefit
Friday Punk Night!! Voku 7-9pm & Gig 9pm-Late
The benefit is for comrades in Greece who are currently in an appeal procedure over incidents during the resquatting of Matrozou 45 and have been handed a 6.5 year sentence. The appeal trial is taking place on 02 December 2025. Initially the sentence was lower but the Greek state intervened and wanted to make an example of them and demanded the sentence handed out was more severe.The four accused comrades were found guilty with a total sentence of 77 months for property damage and grievous bodily harm against the riot cops involved in the eviction.
All proceeds will go towards their ongoing trial costs. No squatters in prison!
With Röt Stewart (be)
Fast and ugly hardcore from BelgiumNN17 (nl)
Punk from the sewers of AmsterdamCrowbite (nl)
Folk core punk from AmsterdamDj Rengo Estar playing ska punk oi plus merch stands
Date & Time:
Friday, 12 December, 2025 - 19:00Price:
3-5 €
👥 by Autonomia Promotions (source)
https://acties.todon.nl/event/greek-anarchist-legal-aid-benefit
-
Greek anarchist legal aid benefit
Vrankrijk, Amsterdam, vrijdag 12 december om 19:00 CET
Röt Stewart (be) / Nn17 (nl) / Crowbite (nl) / Dj Rengo Estar / Greek Anarchist Legal Aid Benefit
Friday Punk Night!! Voku 7-9pm & Gig 9pm-Late
The benefit is for comrades in Greece who are currently in an appeal procedure over incidents during the resquatting of Matrozou 45 and have been handed a 6.5 year sentence. The appeal trial is taking place on 02 December 2025. Initially the sentence was lower but the Greek state intervened and wanted to make an example of them and demanded the sentence handed out was more severe.The four accused comrades were found guilty with a total sentence of 77 months for property damage and grievous bodily harm against the riot cops involved in the eviction.
All proceeds will go towards their ongoing trial costs. No squatters in prison!
With Röt Stewart (be)
Fast and ugly hardcore from BelgiumNN17 (nl)
Punk from the sewers of AmsterdamCrowbite (nl)
Folk core punk from AmsterdamDj Rengo Estar playing ska punk oi plus merch stands
Date & Time:
Friday, 12 December, 2025 - 19:00Price:
3-5 €
👥 by Autonomia Promotions (source)
https://acties.todon.nl/event/greek-anarchist-legal-aid-benefit
-
Greek anarchist legal aid benefit
Vrankrijk, Amsterdam, vrijdag 12 december om 19:00 CET
Röt Stewart (be) / Nn17 (nl) / Crowbite (nl) / Dj Rengo Estar / Greek Anarchist Legal Aid Benefit
Friday Punk Night!! Voku 7-9pm & Gig 9pm-Late
The benefit is for comrades in Greece who are currently in an appeal procedure over incidents during the resquatting of Matrozou 45 and have been handed a 6.5 year sentence. The appeal trial is taking place on 02 December 2025. Initially the sentence was lower but the Greek state intervened and wanted to make an example of them and demanded the sentence handed out was more severe.The four accused comrades were found guilty with a total sentence of 77 months for property damage and grievous bodily harm against the riot cops involved in the eviction.
All proceeds will go towards their ongoing trial costs. No squatters in prison!
With Röt Stewart (be)
Fast and ugly hardcore from BelgiumNN17 (nl)
Punk from the sewers of AmsterdamCrowbite (nl)
Folk core punk from AmsterdamDj Rengo Estar playing ska punk oi plus merch stands
Date & Time:
Friday, 12 December, 2025 - 19:00Price:
3-5 €
👥 by Autonomia Promotions (source)
https://acties.todon.nl/event/greek-anarchist-legal-aid-benefit
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Tankies being tankies.
Freedom News: *A left that carries the state inside it*
"Maoist assault on Athens anarchists exposed a hierarchical political culture shaped by patriarchal command habits"
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/11/18/a-left-that-carries-the-state-inside-it/
#tankies #maoists #anarchists #Maoism #anarchism #Athens #Greece
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Whether it's #Antifa, #Anarchists, #Anonymous (the real one, not Q-Anon crappo), #Socialists, #Environmentalists, etc. -- seems to me that we're all fighting for the same thing! Getting rid of #Oligarchy / #Capitalism, ruling ourselves, and building a #sustainable life in harmony with Mother Earth and making adjustments for #ClimateChange (and preventing the problem from getting worse). And what is wrong with that? IMHO, nothing! Well, unless you're a billionaire / CEO / Oligarch!
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Whether it's #Antifa, #Anarchists, #Anonymous (the real one, not Q-Anon crappo), #Socialists, #Environmentalists, etc. -- seems to me that we're all fighting for the same thing! Getting rid of #Oligarchy / #Capitalism, ruling ourselves, and building a #sustainable life in harmony with Mother Earth and making adjustments for #ClimateChange (and preventing the problem from getting worse). And what is wrong with that? IMHO, nothing! Well, unless you're a billionaire / CEO / Oligarch!
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https://community.admitone.com/commie-bop-open-mic-2025-10-07/MDU37A?
Hosted by PINDN and Wes Carroll A #CommieBop is an expression of freedom, verve, and solidarity. Share yours with us—let’s bask in the liberating imagination of our city!
Sign Up Via Google Forums or at 6:45pm before the event. Doors: 6pm Event: 7pm - 10pm Performer sign up: https://forms.gle/kXjoJbyf155p1ktY9All proceeds go to Awi'nakola: Tree of Life Foundation A Commie Bop is freedom in motion—a song, a poem, a spell, a skit, a dance against the grind of #colonial #capitalism. It’s where creativity smashes exploitation, where solidarity squeezes alienation, and where we (yes, we, the ridiculous and unruly) celebrate our collective fire. This is a space to howl #anticapitalist anthems, share art that bites back, and honor past and future generations. #Leftist debates? Vital. But tonight we revel in the kaleidoscope of our movement, checking our purity test kits at the door with our hearts open to each other’s stories. We have license to be silly little peasants! Think Carnival mocking lords and kings…
#OpenMic Sets: Your offering does NOT need to involve a complex analysis - our day-to-day experiences put us into the crosshairs of capitalism’s contradictions. Sets should be 10 minutes or less. Please explain why you chose or wrote what you’re sharing. #Performers are encouraged to make space for audience participation - teach us your chorus, wrangle us into your skit, add call and response, or bring up Alice to play the tambourine or the triangle.
All acts should, in their own unique way, call for an end to exploitation and discrimination. This space celebrates dignity. Check lyrics for oppressive language (racist, sexist, ableist, SWERFS, TERFS, etc.). We fight systems, not each other. Please respect the venue.
We will save five sets as first come first serve before the event and open up the rest for folks who wish to register via Google Forms. NOT READY YET? Join the crowd, soak up the vibes, and cook something up for next time.
#VictoriaBC #AnarchoSocialists #Anarchists #YYJEvents #CommunityEvent #CommunitySharing #CommunityEngagement #PerformingArts #Skits #Lekwungen #Songhees #Esquimalt #Wsanec #Saanich #Vicwest #ViewRoyal #ActsOfResistance #AntiColonial #decolonization #DecolonizeYourMind #CommunistsWelcome #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PNW
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https://community.admitone.com/commie-bop-open-mic-2025-10-07/MDU37A?
Hosted by PINDN and Wes Carroll A #CommieBop is an expression of freedom, verve, and solidarity. Share yours with us—let’s bask in the liberating imagination of our city!
Sign Up Via Google Forums or at 6:45pm before the event. Doors: 6pm Event: 7pm - 10pm Performer sign up: https://forms.gle/kXjoJbyf155p1ktY9All proceeds go to Awi'nakola: Tree of Life Foundation A Commie Bop is freedom in motion—a song, a poem, a spell, a skit, a dance against the grind of #colonial #capitalism. It’s where creativity smashes exploitation, where solidarity squeezes alienation, and where we (yes, we, the ridiculous and unruly) celebrate our collective fire. This is a space to howl #anticapitalist anthems, share art that bites back, and honor past and future generations. #Leftist debates? Vital. But tonight we revel in the kaleidoscope of our movement, checking our purity test kits at the door with our hearts open to each other’s stories. We have license to be silly little peasants! Think Carnival mocking lords and kings…
#OpenMic Sets: Your offering does NOT need to involve a complex analysis - our day-to-day experiences put us into the crosshairs of capitalism’s contradictions. Sets should be 10 minutes or less. Please explain why you chose or wrote what you’re sharing. #Performers are encouraged to make space for audience participation - teach us your chorus, wrangle us into your skit, add call and response, or bring up Alice to play the tambourine or the triangle.
All acts should, in their own unique way, call for an end to exploitation and discrimination. This space celebrates dignity. Check lyrics for oppressive language (racist, sexist, ableist, SWERFS, TERFS, etc.). We fight systems, not each other. Please respect the venue.
We will save five sets as first come first serve before the event and open up the rest for folks who wish to register via Google Forms. NOT READY YET? Join the crowd, soak up the vibes, and cook something up for next time.
#VictoriaBC #AnarchoSocialists #Anarchists #YYJEvents #CommunityEvent #CommunitySharing #CommunityEngagement #PerformingArts #Skits #Lekwungen #Songhees #Esquimalt #Wsanec #Saanich #Vicwest #ViewRoyal #ActsOfResistance #AntiColonial #decolonization #DecolonizeYourMind #CommunistsWelcome #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PNW
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CW: Unarmada for Gaza: Long bars, extreme content
home #DAARVO feds yet to #merc and #narc us
smash our #heartland up; calmly #FARC us
but mark this; #markets are #MarkingTargets
garnering chips before #Autumn darkens
looking for our links to chill our parlance
listing #collectives , #trans and #anarchists
and if these corpses swept under carpets
trust they coming next for our kids
be it #Farage or whoever’s in charge,
our tyrant’s tools will have us in our compartments
chemical froth corrupting our lungs
minds addled by the slop, #SaveOurSons
#f35 tonne bomb mach one
song old as rhyme – #TheBeastIsGaston
#quadcopters will soon barrage us
one hot post will be cause to charge us
wires and walls and #checkpoints will part us
a crime from you and they’ll kill your fathers
#warning : content’s awful mar true
sins are mortal and laws are martial
a living child interred in rubble
the rocks won’t crack an inch; she can’t pull
in Gaza as in #Mosul and #Kabul
dogs ran with morsels of human charnel
now even the mongrels’ deathly gargle
life taken hostage by unremarked ghouls
like #GenghisKhan and #JeffreyDahmer
the #ThaneOfGlamis and rabid #piranhas
slashed up a world of kids with #katanas
hung them from larches like #pinatas
pincushioned by acid archers
then called in the #AirBarrages
posting vids as they blew the charges
truly the most moral armies
then as we scream “ #MassMurder ” started singing #FrankSinatra
#WishingOnAStar wearing literal guts for garters
try with all my #dada can’t impart the sheer #disaster
we’ll all always have been most against this in the hereafter3/7
#Bars
#Poetry
#Lyrics
#Songs
#writing
#rhymescheme
#geopol
#MiddleEast
#IsraeliWarCrimes
#FreedomFlotilla
#Sumud
#ConvoyOfSteadfastness
#FreePalestine
#Madleen
#AntiFascist
#Genocide
#UKpol
#Labour
#RuleOfLaw
#Atrocity
#Imperalism
#Collapse
#Ethics
#Society -
CW: Unarmada for Gaza: Long bars, extreme content
home #DAARVO feds yet to #merc and #narc us
smash our #heartland up; calmly #FARC us
but mark this; #markets are #MarkingTargets
garnering chips before #Autumn darkens
looking for our links to chill our parlance
listing #collectives , #trans and #anarchists
and if these corpses swept under carpets
trust they coming next for our kids
be it #Farage or whoever’s in charge,
our tyrant’s tools will have us in our compartments
chemical froth corrupting our lungs
minds addled by the slop, #SaveOurSons
#f35 tonne bomb mach one
song old as rhyme – #TheBeastIsGaston
#quadcopters will soon barrage us
one hot post will be cause to charge us
wires and walls and #checkpoints will part us
a crime from you and they’ll kill your fathers
#warning : content’s awful mar true
sins are mortal and laws are martial
a living child interred in rubble
the rocks won’t crack an inch; she can’t pull
in Gaza as in #Mosul and #Kabul
dogs ran with morsels of human charnel
now even the mongrels’ deathly gargle
life taken hostage by unremarked ghouls
like #GenghisKhan and #JeffreyDahmer
the #ThaneOfGlamis and rabid #piranhas
slashed up a world of kids with #katanas
hung them from larches like #pinatas
pincushioned by acid archers
then called in the #AirBarrages
posting vids as they blew the charges
truly the most moral armies
then as we scream “ #MassMurder ” started singing #FrankSinatra
#WishingOnAStar wearing literal guts for garters
try with all my #dada can’t impart the sheer #disaster
we’ll all always have been most against this in the hereafter3/7
#Bars
#Poetry
#Lyrics
#Songs
#writing
#rhymescheme
#geopol
#MiddleEast
#IsraeliWarCrimes
#FreedomFlotilla
#Sumud
#ConvoyOfSteadfastness
#FreePalestine
#Madleen
#AntiFascist
#Genocide
#UKpol
#Labour
#RuleOfLaw
#Atrocity
#Imperalism
#Collapse
#Ethics
#Society -
CW: Unarmada for Gaza: Long bars, extreme content
home #DAARVO feds yet to #merc and #narc us
smash our #heartland up; calmly #FARC us
but mark this; #markets are #MarkingTargets
garnering chips before #Autumn darkens
looking for our links to chill our parlance
listing #collectives , #trans and #anarchists
and if these corpses swept under carpets
trust they coming next for our kids
be it #Farage or whoever’s in charge,
our tyrant’s tools will have us in our compartments
chemical froth corrupting our lungs
minds addled by the slop, #SaveOurSons
#f35 tonne bomb mach one
song old as rhyme – #TheBeastIsGaston
#quadcopters will soon barrage us
one hot post will be cause to charge us
wires and walls and #checkpoints will part us
a crime from you and they’ll kill your fathers
#warning : content’s awful mar true
sins are mortal and laws are martial
a living child interred in rubble
the rocks won’t crack an inch; she can’t pull
in Gaza as in #Mosul and #Kabul
dogs ran with morsels of human charnel
now even the mongrels’ deathly gargle
life taken hostage by unremarked ghouls
like #GenghisKhan and #JeffreyDahmer
the #ThaneOfGlamis and rabid #piranhas
slashed up a world of kids with #katanas
hung them from larches like #pinatas
pincushioned by acid archers
then called in the #AirBarrages
posting vids as they blew the charges
truly the most moral armies
then as we scream “ #MassMurder ” started singing #FrankSinatra
#WishingOnAStar wearing literal guts for garters
try with all my #dada can’t impart the sheer #disaster
we’ll all always have been most against this in the hereafter3/7
#Bars
#Poetry
#Lyrics
#Songs
#writing
#rhymescheme
#geopol
#MiddleEast
#IsraeliWarCrimes
#FreedomFlotilla
#Sumud
#ConvoyOfSteadfastness
#FreePalestine
#Madleen
#AntiFascist
#Genocide
#UKpol
#Labour
#RuleOfLaw
#Atrocity
#Imperalism
#Collapse
#Ethics
#Society
