But Eigel isn’t alone in his condemnation of the bill. Another Republican, Missouri State Senator Sandy Crawford, claimed the incest and rape provision shouldn’t pass because “God is perfect.”

“God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen, bad things happen,” Crawford said. “I’m not gonna be able to support the amendments because I am very pro-life.”

You can’t help but appreciate the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance you gotta have to say, “God is perfect,” and “…for some reason He allows … bad things [to] happen.” How delusional can you be to say that raped children giving birth is part of some perfect, divine plan?

Social conservatism is a complete joke.

Maybe home-grown human intelligence (HGHI)?

This flag was used by the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. As you can see, it has a very intricate design rich with symbolism.

Fun fact: The escutcheon (shield) of the Jamahiriya’s coat of arms uses a similar level of excruciating detail.

Continuing with the trend of vexillological organizations having their own flags, the Flag Society of Australia has one. While the flag within the flag looks really cool and has a nice color palette, I think the flag as a whole looks a bit odd. The Southern Cross looks weird since its stars are crowded closer together but not shrunken themselves, and the arrangement of everything just doesn’t work imo.

Explanation for anyone who wants it: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2878:_Supernova

They’ve been mostly resolved in my experience. Kbin.social has been working great.

@interstellar is being developed for Android, and Lunar is working on Kbin support for iOS. Still a good ways to go tmk, but we’re getting there!

If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?

Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it’s part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.

However, instances don’t have to federate with Threads. That’s part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don’t want to deal with an influx of hate, don’t want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don’t want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn’t make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.

When I made this flag, I used red to symbolize the violent history of the Kansas Territory, a yellow stripe at the bottom to evoke a wheat field (given that one of Kansas’s nicknames is the Wheat State), and a sunflower at the top left. I didn’t notice the communist connotation of a red flag with a yellow symbol in the canton until someone pointed it out back when I posted this on Reddit. I still really like how the design looks, though maybe it’d be best to change the red to blue.

100% agree. I don’t have pine trees on all my New England flag redesigns (just New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine), but I might make versions where all of them do, maybe with the same pine tree design.

Thanks for the feedback!

I’ve honestly never thought of the Mexico comparison, though I can kinda see it now. I think the buff center and the pine tree are enough to differentiate it from the Mexican flag, though I may flip the green and red.

The tree design was taken directly from Maine’s ensign, and the star position came from Maine’s old flag. As for the Texas point, the lone star is used in other U.S. state flags, like those of Arizona and California (and North Carolina but that one does just look like a Texas flag ripoff), so I don’t think it’s unfitting to use it here, especially since it was on the old flag.

Symbolism:

• The pine tree in the middle is taken from Maine’s ensign and is a prominent symbol of Maine.
• The pine green stripe represents Maine’s forest.
• The star in the top left is taken from Maine’s old flag and represents the North Star, which itself symbolizes Maine’s motto, “Dirigo” (meaning “I lead”).
• The buff is taken from Maine’s old flag.
• The red symbolizes the state’s presence in New England.

EDIT: Fixed an error.

He seems to really like “Maryland-style” flags, which just have a ton going on all over the place. I don’t really like those kinds of flags, though honestly New Brunswick’s isn’t that bad. The top and bottom strips each stick to a solid color on a solid background (yellow on red for the top and white on blue for the bottom). I’m not a huge fan of the middle strip with the ship — I think it would be better if it stuck to solid color on solid color like the top and bottom — but it doesn’t use that many colors and goes well with the water.

I much prefer this flag for Maine compared to the current one, which is just the state’s coat of arms on a blue field. It’s much more unique compared to other flags and does a great job symbolizing Maine’s nickname: the Pine Tree State.

Additionally, there’s this more recent version of the old flag, which uses the pine tree from Maine’s state ensign. This is probably my favorite, and I’d like to see it or something similar become Maine’s flag in the future.

You forgot Rule 1 of the fediverse: Kbin does not exist.

Let me try to explain a bit better.

Let’s take an instance called Instance A. Instance A is currently on the fediverse, which we’ll say is pretty evenly distributed. No instance has a large enough portion of users whereby others would have problems with activity loss if they defederated, which is good. If any instance starts doing things that Instance A doesn’t agree with, they can defederate, and less activity won’t be much of a concern with defederating from that single instance.

But now, let’s take Instance B. Instance B is planning to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse, and when it does so, it will control 80% of the activity. In other words, it has as much activity as the rest of the fediverse combined.

However, Instance B isn’t particularly trustworthy. They don’t value the open web like the rest of the fediverse does, their moderation is extremely poor, and they haven’t cared for general well being in the past if it meant raising profits.

Here, Instance A and instances like it have two options: defederate immediately, or wait and see.

• If it defederates immediately, Instance A will see some users move to other parts of the fediverse because they’re excited about the 5x increase in activity from Instance B. They probably won’t go to Instance B now, but maybe Instance C or D. However, a lot of people will be fine. After all, activity is staying the way it is, and Instance B is untrustworthy anyway.
• If it waits and sees, this allows people on Instance A to enjoy and get used to the 5x increase in activity. Not bad so far.

However, let’s say Instance B starts having moderation issues (e.g., widespread hate speech and more-than-usual spam) as everyone reasonably predicted. Instance A now wants to defederate.

• If it defederated before, no problem! Nothing needs to be done.
• If it didn’t and wants to start defederation now, good luck. Now, everyone on Instance A has gotten used to the 5x activity on Instance B, and you’re going to have an extremely difficult time convincing them to cut the activity they see and the users they follow by 80%. Way more people will leave Instance A if it defederates now than if it had just defederated early on.

In other words, if people on Instance A come to rely on Instance B for the activity they’re used to, way more people will join the camp of “I’m leaving if you defederate with Instance B” then if Instance A just defederated from the get-go.

Let’s take another example. Instance B wants to try to grab a bunch of users, so after some time, they stop federating at all.

• If Instance A defederated, the people there are fine. They never saw stuff from Instance B anyway.
• If Instance A didn’t defederate, then 80% of the content that people are used to will suddenly be gone. Most of the accounts they follow will be disconnected, and activity will fall a ton. These users on Instance A will have two options: stay, with a horrendous drop in activity and no posts from the accounts they’re most interested in; or just go to Instance B.
  In either case, Instance B will be fine. Most interaction was between Instance B users, so this won’t be that much of a deal. But for users on other instances that are used to seeing stuff from B, it’d be catastrophic.

In short, defederating immediately has much smaller consequences than trying to defederate when whoever you want to defederate from controls most of the activity that your users see.

@juggles
Can’t say I’m great at it either. Honestly, platformer game type is a weird concept for Geometry dash, but I don’t mind it. The way different game modes are incorporated into it is really fun though

That’s because I’m not fully sure on how people should act in respect to this Threads situation (which is what got me thinking about all of this in the first place). In the recent past, I was all “defederate defederate defederate defederate,” but now considering that multiple large platforms (like Flipboard) will be joining in, it’s less likely that one company will control a majority of activity. Of course, you don’t need a majority for there to be a problem — just a large enough portion for other instances to have issues defederating due to the amount of content they’d lose — but a mere large portion and not a supermajority may not be reason to defederate. Of course, there are other things to consider as well, and I’ll probably make yet another wall of text with my new thoughts on how instances should handle this in the near future. For now, this thread is for me to share the ideals that I think people on the fediverse should prioritize and for others to discuss what they think on the matter.

Of course, these platforms have only federated a handful of accounts, so the “chaos” right now is in the reaction and discourse. However, I don’t think it’s unjustified.

I’ve outlined my main issues with Threads federation here, and while I’m not as sold on preemptive defederation as I was when I made the post, I still find it reasonable to be concerned about about for-profit companies controlling a vast majority of the content, especially when (A) the users making that content may be unaware that they’re on the fediverse to begin with and (B) companies like Meta have a terrible track record and would have incentive to grab a ton of users by defederating if they’re able (though with so many other parties joining in, whether they’ll be able to pull something off like that is becoming more questionable, hence me being less sure of the need to defederate).

Nah, just some teen making very inefficient use of his time