As much as political differences matter, you will not change his mind by not going - but your relationships will get much, much more bitter, and it will be hard to rectify. Many people went through this mistake, and it costed them a lot.

Honor his wedding while keeping to your values. This event has nothing to do with them.

I imagine merge conflict alerts would be very common as well as it all grows.

Ideally, no user configuration on an everyday basis should be required.

That’s a cool concept, but there are indeed some caveats to address, especially with the propagation part. For example, if you rely on user A to filter you gaming posts, and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore. Or if he is a sudden Nazi, not only you but people who trust you will get that content until you react (and until then, some others will unsubscribe you).

With a complicated enough network of trusted people, this will trigger a chaotic chain reaction that will make your feed less stable than a chair with one leg.

Also, conflicts should be resolved somehow. If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?

One way to go about it is to create a limited list of authorities, but that obviously comes with the danger of someone having too much power. You can make groups of people vote for inclusion or exclusion of topics, but it’s not feasible to vote for every single filter because there are simply too many. You can elect someone to do this, but we know what may happen to elected officials.

Luckily, there’s normally little cost to switching Lemmy instances anyway. You can even probably take the same username and register on another instance, quickly rebuild your feed and that’s mostly it.

As everything is connected and there’s not much reason accumulating account age/karma/you name it, the loss is pretty minor.

On decentralized media (Mastodon at the very least), you can move your account and your subscribers to any other instance whenever you want. You move with your audience, and they’ll barely notice any change, using the same app to keep following the same person automatically.

Federation provides some answers. While it is entirely possible to defederate everyone you as an admin disagree with or don’t want to promote, most commonly instances pick the option to not defederate all at will, as the majority of people actually prefers to be connected for the most part.

A bit more plausible deniability

Happy to share something new :)

Israel is not part of NATO, this is factually wrong.

I’m referring to Israel.

The last time it militarily intervened in claiming foreign land for an allied country despite the objection of nearly the entire world is right now.

That’s not to mention an enormous amount of coups and military interventions throughout the last decades. US has sewn more chaos globally than any other country in the history of the world - all in its own interest, of course.

Here, opinions may vary, but that’s outside the scope.

If you want my personal opinions, I would reverse the numbers. China is spreading authoritarian power and commits human rights violations primarily within its own confines and in some nearby regions like South China Sea, USA does it globally. Both are not great, though, and commonly I try to treat them with the same measuring stick.

Sure, but here it’s pretty much about the trade war between the two.

Neither side is just, and so seeing it as “China bad” is not a neutral outlook.

In the US-centric environment, standing up for neutrality is easy to confuse with standing up for China.

“Whataboutism” is a term used to feel righteous while completely ignoring your bias.

Admitting both contries are bad and then taking a clear stance between them is hypocritical at best.

Not really.

Dems are primarily sponsored by the rich and have to align with their interests. Out of two major US political parties, neither one is the party of the people.

I respect the American people, their modern advancements in science and technology, their industry, their customs, and their rich history and culture.

I do not respect a hostile dictatorship of corporate overlords that rules over them all, and if they were smart they would not, either.

Every media is physical. The question is, where is it located.

A properly backed up and sorted digital collection is superior to a bunch of disks laying around, at least if we don’t consider the pleasure and pride some collectors take in having exactly the latter. But when we allow this data to be stored in a place we don’t own, real and serious problems arise.

Well, it is censorship.

People just wake up to a realization that some censorship should exist, and it makes many uncomfortable.

Other than that, don’t be tolerant of the intolerant, and you’ll be fine.

Math is pretty solid

It also strives in the world of censorship, it just serves the dominant force then.