Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.

Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

Nazi furries have been a thing for years. The regular furries don’t like them.

Fascists aren’t morally healthy humans. Authoritarians can’t cope with social reality, where different people can have different opinions and loyalties and yet support each other. They always seem to end up succumbing to patriarchal cults, where Lenin-Hitler-Mao-Trump gets to do whatever he wants to your sons and your daughters, and you and your working class have no recourse.

Free Software started as a political movement about the rights of computer users to learn, share, and improve the systems we use. Open Source was the business-friendly depoliticized version.

A slur always tells you more about the person who uses it than about the person they’re referring to.

The airlines managed to figure it out, weirdly enough. Calculating the price of an airline seat is Turing-complete, and at least one airline software service, ITA, needed the runtime compilation feature of Common Lisp to do it efficiently. Yes, when a user asked for a ticket price, their systems wrote and compiled a piece of code to determine the answer.

If your billing is too complicated to be accurately described to your customers, then you may have put yourself in a situation where you are incapable of being honest with your customers. That’s on you.

It’s the job of regulators to ensure that you are honest with your customers; therefore, they can reasonably forbid you from having billing so complicated that it cannot be described accurately.

It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.

Let’s be absolutely clear about that:

For years (2008-2011), Reddit hosted forums for pedophiles to share “legal” pictures of young girls for other pedophiles’ erotic entertainment.

For years, Reddit hosted forums for misogynistic men to encourage one another to perpetrate violence against women; for racists to promote and plan violence against black people; etc.

And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly

One component of a system being “user-friendly” is that it must not sabotage or undermine the user on behalf of the system’s proprietor.

Unfortunately, this means that proprietary systems rarely remain user-friendly forever, as most proprietors eventually want to sabotage the user in some way or another, and can rarely resist the temptation forever.

They do, though. It’s called Führerprinzip, or “the leader principle”.

Wikipedia says:

The ideology of the Führerprinzip sees each organization as a hierarchy of leaders, where every leader (Führer, in German) has absolute responsibility in his own area, demands absolute obedience from those below him, and answers only to his superiors.

In this view, absolutely everything in society must be made authoritarian. Cooperative and democratic forms of social organization are considered corrosive to social order, and therefore are not allowed. Disrespecting your Führer — any of your Führers, at any level — must be punished, with penalties up to & including death.

If there is a social organization at any level — a family, a church, a workplace, a school, a local government — it must have a Führer to take responsibility for it, and everyone else involved must obey that Führer unquestioningly. Anything else is social chaos and probably Communism.

Children and wives obey the man of the house, who is wholly responsible for them. If the man of the house fails to enforce order (that is, compliance with his own Führers), then his own Führers must remove him from that responsibility. For instance, if a child deviates from the state governor’s dictates on gender, that child must be removed from his father’s home and placed into a more obedient home.

Workers obey bosses and business owners. Worker-owned enterprises are not allowed as they are obviously Communism. Unions are wrong, as they exist to second-guess the will of the business’s Führer for his workers. Moreover, it is the job of each business leader to bring his business into line with the dictates of higher Führers. Businesses that fail to obey the economic and cultural dictates of the Führer must be punished; see e.g. Disney.

Students obey teachers, who obey principals, who obey the state governor. If a teacher fails to demand that children fall in line with the directives passed down from the state governor, it is the duty of the principal to not only fire that teacher, but report them for prosecution.

Oh. Yes, exactly, that’s what squicked me about it.

Which part?

There were a whole bunch of mergers & acquisitions. Wikipedia has the whole sordid history.

For me, it jumped the shark around the time of the 2004 “OMG Ponies!” April Fools prank, which came across as nerd boys making fun of women in tech.

Slashdot started in 1997 and was sold to Andover.net in 1999, in the midst of a lot of early Linux people making a butt-ton of money (on paper, anyway) via the VALinux IPO.

VALinux, amusingly enough, eventually morphed into ThinkGeek and was later bought by Gamestop, an entity about which much has been written …

Longtermism doesn’t have to do with one’s own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Elon.

Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.

This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.

But a fixation on one’s own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That’s more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.