Garfield has no solutions
He readily admitted as much when I asked him on mastodon about how to approach the subject with friends and family who are using the “it is what it is” rationalization. Then mentioned cult deprogramming research as something he’s not as well versed in as he would like.
Make of that what you will/want
Someone is working on something related: https://soatok.blog/2025/12/15/announcing-key-transparency-fediverse/
The rest of their blog is pretty great, too!
I hope, say in a few years, that I’ll be able to make light-hearted jokes about the “piefed v lemmy” flame wars and people will either not care to learn about it or smile knowingly and then change the subject anyways.
Thankfully the birds are often content to do most of the talking
I think Ada already said it better than I will, but yeah there’s a few too many simplifications and short-circuits (in reasoning/logic) in what you have written. If society stopped claiming people “should” be this or that just because of some physical characteristics they were born with, the “conflict” you outline ceases to exist. Trans people (and “non-conforming” people in general) could fulfill whatever roles and stereotypes they resonate with, and still fit in just fine.
Plus, the stereotypes some of us resonate with simply do not neatly map onto society’s stereotypes of men and women. Some people who have outwardly transitioned may seem to be moulding themselves into society’s “traditional” gender norms, sure. Putting aside those who do so out of self preservation or fear of persecution, I would argue it’s just happenstance (in other words, pure luck) that who they want to be in life lines up so neatly with these existing delineations. It doesn’t conflict with the push to stop expecting and demanding people fit other people’s schemas.
I don’t know that stereotypes are necessarily harmful, not do I think that the point of equality is to get rid of them. Rather, they should have no bearing on our worth, and we should not be reducing people to the various stereotypes we know of. We are infinitely more complex and varied beings than any stereotypes that anyone has ever conceived.
Myself, I prefer to think of stereotypes as archetypes, like in storytelling. They are shortcuts that evoke certain character traits. They cannot describe the totality of a person, only facets. Thus, we should be careful to not expect people to fit “inside” them; therein lies the/a root of a lot of harm. If that is too difficult, better to do away with thinking in terms of stereotypes than demean those who don’t fit them.
I get random friend requests from accounts in discord servers that I haven’t even viewed, let alone interacted in, for years - most have some sort of “live/laugh/love” bio blurb. Maybe I’m just an antisocial hermit at this point, but I ignore every single one.
In comparison, Steam seems a lot more genuine. You can always try suggesting discord for voice chat if you’re leery of installing an unknown program just for talking to that user.
Congratulations! As a simple user on another “local” instance, I’m glad y’all are still around and as healthy as ever.
I’m surprised that’s what your experience of it was. To me it was about his hopeless (arguably naive) struggle to do what he thought was right and true in a time where both truth and morality were mostly becoming weaponized in service of alignments of power. He thought he could thread the needle only to time and time again have simply been used by others to further their own agendas, leaving hurt bystanders in his wake.
I somewhat agree that an hour could be cut out, though I don’t exactly know which parts.
I’ll va être temps d’apprendre à faire du ssh -{L,R} !
It’s absurd how comforting it is to read your post, OP, and all these other’s comments. One could think it would be depressing to realize so many others are in a similar state, and yet I mainly feel relieved at not being alone in such an experience.
For those curious about how this fork came to be, KnowYourMeme had a decent rundown: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/godot-engine-user-blocking-controversy-wokot
All the talks are supposed to be livestreamed and recorded, so the choice is thankfully more just which one(s) do you want to attend in person. Which is great, because in my experience half of the fun of FOSDEM is chatting with other attendees outside of any talk at all!
Quite a few! And so many overlap! Thankfully they’re all supposed to be live streamed and recorded. An excerpt of my personal schedule:
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/FXLB7M-outside_the_beaten_path_of_css/
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/3EEZZB-open-source-batteries/
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/WQBBR9-map-your-grid/
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SK3Z3Q-epaper-driving-waveforms-explained/
This is just Saturday…
I guess it only makes sense that after Liquid Ass UI, we’d get Fuzzy Toilet Seat UI
I hesitate to bring this up because you’ve clearly already done most of the hard work, but I’m planning on attending the following conference talk this weekend that might be of interest to you: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VEQTLH-infrastructure-as-python/
ehehehehe thanks for that mental image
Of course, one can always reclaim that space if the data truly is inaccessible. Makes me want to write a joke program for “cleaning up” after ransomware that just removes the data from the partition table (or whatever the equivalent for files is - would that just be rm?)
Nitpick:
For instance, the terms ‘a community with a shared future for mankind’ and ‘Xi Jinping thought on ecological civilisation’ have been repeatedly found in different texts.
Just “appearing” in different texts is almost meaningless - the context could very well have been “Xi Jinping thought on ecological civilisation found lacking when confronted with local context of such-and-such impoverished community”. If you’re going to accuse something of being propaganda you really need to be more precise than that, else you’re mostly providing the CCP (in this case) with further reason to claim this is just US-leaning, anti-China propaganda.
I recently went from 0 to 1. Reinstalled my VPS under debian, and decided to run my forgejo instance with their rootless container. Mostly as a learning experience, but also to easily decouple the forgejo version from whichever version my distro packages.
In case you omitted the following out of ignorance and not by deliberate choice:
podman unsharecan be used to (mostly) painlessly access the files created by rootless podman.